At a certain point (generally at about $100k), the vast majority people quickly stop consuming their income and start hoarding it. Oh sure, some will burn through it on booze, drugs and hookers, but most start shoving that capital back into capital.
Which is otherwise known as "investing", which is generally a good thing, providing money for loans, growing businesses, etc.
"The higher that income gets, the smaller the percentage of it that is consumed. So, your "fair" tax would, dollar-for-dollar, tax someone making $100k the same as someone making $1M
...and I got news for you, that "used property" exclusion? Well, they ain't makin' any new land, so guess what will happen to the price of dirt? Well, until we're vacationing on the Moon.
"We need 2.5T to keep the proverbial lights on in the federal government. You WILL PAY FOR IT SOMEHOW."
The Fair Tax has been set up with an initial rate of 23%, which is calculated to directly replace the funds currently used to keep the lights on by the Federal Income Tax.
"A "prebate?" So, everyone gets a monthly check for the taxes on the first $14k of income, assumed to be consumed? Gah... That is going to eliminate the bureaucracy precisely HOW?"
"Business purposes = no tax? Again, people nearing or exceeding $100k routinely put their entire damned lives on Schedule C (or into corporations) for exactly this purpose."
This is a valid area for concern. But remember, people cheat on their taxes today. The goal of the Fair Tax isn't to make a more cheat-proof system (though I believe it does just that), but rather to make a simpler, fairer system of taxation.
>Curiously, I wasn't suggesting anything be done by either the Democratic or the Republican parties.
TFA was about the Democratic Party's plans for their platform, and this thread is about the health care portion of that plan.
The post you responded to was pointing out the obvious - someone has to pay for the health care and if you make it cheaper for someone it's going to get more expensive for someone else.
Your option was to make healthcare less expensive overall.
So, in the context of TFA, my question still stands: Which solution do/you/ think the Democratic Party is more likely to implement to achieve their stated goal of "health care for all American within five years"? Legislation to enact cost-cutting, or just add a tax burden onto people already paying for their health care to subsidize everyone elses health care?
You're never going to reduce the costs enough to get health care for all Americans. The only way you are going to get this done is by getting taxpayers to pay for it.
>Spend a day in an inner city school in Philly and tell me how "easy" it is to stay in school, keep off drugs, and not get someone pregnant.
I'm not sure what else we can do for them. Like everyone else, they get access to a free education, where they in turn are educated about the dangers of drugs and unprotected sex. If they choose to reject those opportunities, I don't care if they are from Mars - it's their choice.
>Assuming you get through 12 years of that, what job do you get as an average black high school grad. Funny, the investment banking firms aren't beating a path to my door.
I never said you would get to be an investment banker as a high school graduate. I said it was part of not/being poor/.
>I already knew you had no sympathy.
You're right - I have little sympathy for people who arrive at their destinations through their own choices.
"Or it could simply be made less expensive overall."
So, which scenario do you think is more likely to come to pass under the Democratic Party:
A) Legislation that reduces the cost of health care so that more people can afford it.
B) Legislation that simply taxes those of us already paying for our own health care to pay for everyone else?
I highly suspect that as usual the plan will be to enact taxes that I will have to pay for to create a subsidy program that I won't be able to partake in.
I'd probably vote Democratic in an instant if there was reassurance that the social programs created would be equally available to everyone, like a library. Unfortunately, it never works out that way. I'm expected to pay for it, but not allowed to use it.
Aside from the fact that few people are bargain hunting when their life is on the line, the main reason health care is expensive is because the bulk of the people who are paying for it (the insured) have no idea how much they are paying!
My wife and I just had a baby via C-section. Do you know how much it cost me? The whole shebang - hospital visit, surgeon, everything? $120.
How much did it really cost? About $14,000.
There is no incentive to shop around. If insurance companies said, "Look, we will give you $14,000 to have a baby. What you don't spend, you can keep!" people would be shopping around like crazy.
So long as the true costs of health care are hidden, costs will be sky-high.
"So you'd be against spending $40 less each month with that being offset by government spending?
I guarantee you - that is not the way it will work.
Here is how it will work. Everyone who is "rich" enough to currently able to afford $50/month for broadband will continue to pay $50/month for their broadband. But their will now be a $5 tax on top of that used to pay for everyone else to get government subsidized broadband.
It's just like the "Universal Access Charge" on your phone bill. You're going to end up with a "Universal Access Charge" on your broadband bill.
If the Democrats could come up with social programs that I pay for but get to take advantage of, I might support them. But so far, most social programs just become additional taxes for me to pay on top of what I'm already paying to provide the services for myself.
America lags behind other countries that have universal broadband deployment, Pelosi said; but the Democrats' agenda "guarantees" that every American will have affordable access to broadband within five years.
Translation:
People who can afford it today will continue to pay for it, plus we will pay more so that people who can't afford it will get it for free or a substantially reduced price.
You know, I could get behind some of the Democratic Party's socialist ideas if they applied to everyone. Unfortunately it seems like I'm always "too rich" to be on the receiving end of the benefits - I just get to pay for them.
You want to have free (as in beer) internet access for EVERYONE, like libraries? Great - I'm for that - I'll pay some taxes for that.
You want to add a tax somewhere so that I can continue to pay for internet access AND pay for everyone else to have it too? No thanks.
Democrats support "energy independence" within ten years; health care for all American within five years; and "dignified retirement" (no privatization of Social Security) through an "AmeriSave" plan.
I'm all for the energy independence. But my guess is that "health care for all" will really mean I will continue to pay for my own plus pay for everyone else under me. Likewise "diginified retirement" will mean in addition to saving my own funds for retirement I'll be taxed to provide savings for others to retire on, too."
It's hard enough to provide for my own health care and retirement!
I'm tired of being asked to pay for programs that I can't take advantage of myself. If I pay for it, I should have the same level and cost of access as anyone else - just like a library.
From TFA:
""If you're spending all your time on e-mail, you're not listening and reading," says Rogers, who rarely took lecture notes while he was a student so he could listen more intently. "I listen and read; e-mail is a huge distraction.""
Uh, I wonder how he thinks you are supposed to absorb email - osmosis?
"No, it shouldn't. Just because encryption is a very useful hammer does not mean that everything is a nail.
Thanks to Moore's Law, encryption is cheap -- but it's still not free. That's OK for things like E-mail, where the two end-systems handle only a handful of messages at a time. But if the Web suddenly switched from HTTP to HTTPS overnight, Web servers would collapse left and right from having to juggle thousands of simultaneous encrypted connections. Plus, the overhead for setting up an encrypted link is much higher than an unencrypted link, thanks to things like session key negotiation; for short-lived sessions like most HTTP traffic, the cost of setting up the link would dwarf the cost of actually transmitting the data."
Would you please just stop complaining and just fix the problem? Thanks.
:)
Seriously, though - Perhaps you missed it but I already said encryption takes computing power, which is why it isn't done by default today - only pages that require encryption currently get it. I understand today's limitations. I'm talking about the future.
"There are a lot of networking applications where the contents of the packets is just plain not worth protecting from sniffers. Things like multiplayer games and most Web surfing usually fall under that category. There's no reason to force the added overhead on those applications just because we can."
Most of the contents of things sent through the US mail are not worth protecting from people steaming them open, either. But the fact is, even things that ARE worth protecting are relatively secure simply because of the amount of effort it would take to try and examine all mail would be monstrous. Thus the whole system is relatively secure because of the level of effort required to distinguish the "good stuff" from the junk.
If all TCP/IP traffic were encrypted, you'd have the same situation. 99% of the stuff wouldn't be worth decrypting - but the 1% of stuff that was would never be found because you couldn't tell the junk from the "good stuff".
This would strengthen privacy, P2P sharing, VOIP, and totally take the wind out of the sails of the Telcos who want to use packet filtering to cripple the transmit speeds of content they don't like.
>I must be missing something. Is "to A from B" somehow different than "from B to A" ???
I'm not sure what you mean. The fellow was (I think) trying to lament how the CAD market was going from unix to Windows (though he/said/ "windows to unix" - I think he meant "unix to windows" since I was saying our software was only available on Windows).
As I said - I don't care what platform the software runs on.
Hopefully, this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Ultimately, ALL traffic should be encrypted, whether it is VOIP, email, web browsing, whatever.
The guy is right when on his home page he talks about how it is so difficult to implement this sort of stuff as an add-on for emails, managing keys and the like. It's why no one does it. Of course, there has always been a computing overhead, also, which is why only pages that "need" to be secured currently are. But as horsepower goes up, those limitations should go away.
Ultimately, it should be a matter of course before all traffic that goes in our out of your computer is encrypted by default.
>Its a shame the cad market is going to windows from unix.
I think you meant "from unix to windows"?
I'm not surprised. CAD is becoming more and more a commodity - it is currently running about $5000 a seat for stuff like SolidWorks or Pro/Engineer. There are less and less dollars to spend on things like multi-platform support.
Sorry, we are on Windows. They don't even write a *nix version of this software.
Anyone know of a not-responding process monitoring app for Windows?
Steve
Look, when I download a piece of software, I want to click "install", and start using it. I don't want to have to finish writing it before it will be useable on my computer.
I don't know what the state of the art is for compiling code these days, but I know that when I download a program to use on my computer, I don't want to make a Computer Science project out of actually getting it to RUN on my computer. So if it/must/ be compiled to run, I shouldn't know anything about it happening - the compiler and the act of compilation should happen transparently to me.
If I have to go out and download a compiler and who knows what else and get all of/that/ running before I can get to compiling the program I really want to run, I won't be interested.
I'm looking for an application that will monitor a specified application and log how long the application is "not responding".
We use CAD (Computer Aided Design) software, and I would like to justify new hardware by being able to say how much less time we would have to spend waiting on the software if we had faster computers.
If I had a way to measure how often the cursor was an hourglass in our CAD software during the course of a standard workweek and then benchmark this on a new computer I could have a metric that I could use for justification.
"The irony of the NRA is that they continually argue that guns are vitally important to protecting our rights, but they've never used guns to achieve their aims. Instead, they show just how effective writing letters, donating money, and voting on the issues can really be."
If people out there really want to protect our rights, it's really simple, and it doesn't involve threatening to shoot people, shooting people, or getting shot. Just go to the polls this November...
The reason why we are able to "simply" go to the polls is because people used guns to give you that privilege.
You should be thankful that the system still works to the point that the NRA is still only encouraging us to use money, words, and votes, instead of bullets.
Steve
"The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed--where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once." - Judge Alex Kozinski
Vonage is using telco infrastructure to undercut a major telco profit center, without paying a them a dime for the privelege.
Wow, you mean Vonage gets free access to the Internet????? Amazing!
Look - the telco's ARE getting paid, and way more than a "dime". I'm paying $50 a month on my end to use the infrastructure, and God only knows how much Vonage is paying to use the infrastructure.
I feel exactly the same way. Our current TV, the only one in the house, is an RCA 27" CRT that I was given back in 1998. As long as it works, and my DVD player works, I won't be buying anything else.
I'd love to have one of those big LCD TV/monitor things, but I can't afford $2000+ for a TV.
I also agree with you that all the DRM stuff and downgraded signals if you don't have all the right equipment is a huge turn-off for me.
But I suspect that your average Joe doesn't know about these problems and won't even be able to notice if they have a downgraded signal. They'll see "HDTV" on the box and assume that is what they are watching.
Slashdot Mirror
At a certain point (generally at about $100k), the vast majority people quickly stop consuming their income and start hoarding it. Oh sure, some will burn through it on booze, drugs and hookers, but most start shoving that capital back into capital.
m l#48
...and I got news for you, that "used property" exclusion? Well, they ain't makin' any new land, so guess what will happen to the price of dirt? Well, until we're vacationing on the Moon.
f
m l#3
Which is otherwise known as "investing", which is generally a good thing, providing money for loans, growing businesses, etc.
"The higher that income gets, the smaller the percentage of it that is consumed. So, your "fair" tax would, dollar-for-dollar, tax someone making $100k the same as someone making $1M
So what? If a millionare wants to reign in his spending to match that of someone making $100K, so what? You may be interested in: http://www.fairtaxvolunteer.org/smart/faq-main.ht
But they are, of course, making new houses and other buildings. You might be interested in: http://www.fairtax.org/pdfs/TreatmentOFhousing.pd
"We need 2.5T to keep the proverbial lights on in the federal government. You WILL PAY FOR IT SOMEHOW."
The Fair Tax has been set up with an initial rate of 23%, which is calculated to directly replace the funds currently used to keep the lights on by the Federal Income Tax.
"A "prebate?" So, everyone gets a monthly check for the taxes on the first $14k of income, assumed to be consumed? Gah... That is going to eliminate the bureaucracy precisely HOW?"
The prebate has nothing to do with income. You might be interested in: http://www.fairtaxvolunteer.org/smart/faq-main.ht
"Business purposes = no tax? Again, people nearing or exceeding $100k routinely put their entire damned lives on Schedule C (or into corporations) for exactly this purpose."
This is a valid area for concern. But remember, people cheat on their taxes today. The goal of the Fair Tax isn't to make a more cheat-proof system (though I believe it does just that), but rather to make a simpler, fairer system of taxation.
Steve
No appologies.
Steve
>Curiously, I wasn't suggesting anything be done by either the Democratic or the Republican parties.
/you/ think the Democratic Party is more likely to implement to achieve their stated goal of "health care for all American within five years"? Legislation to enact cost-cutting, or just add a tax burden onto people already paying for their health care to subsidize everyone elses health care?
TFA was about the Democratic Party's plans for their platform, and this thread is about the health care portion of that plan.
The post you responded to was pointing out the obvious - someone has to pay for the health care and if you make it cheaper for someone it's going to get more expensive for someone else.
Your option was to make healthcare less expensive overall.
So, in the context of TFA, my question still stands: Which solution do
You're never going to reduce the costs enough to get health care for all Americans. The only way you are going to get this done is by getting taxpayers to pay for it.
Steve
>Spend a day in an inner city school in Philly and tell me how "easy" it is to stay in school, keep off drugs, and not get someone pregnant.
/being poor/.
I'm not sure what else we can do for them. Like everyone else, they get access to a free education, where they in turn are educated about the dangers of drugs and unprotected sex. If they choose to reject those opportunities, I don't care if they are from Mars - it's their choice.
>Assuming you get through 12 years of that, what job do you get as an average black high school grad. Funny, the investment banking firms aren't beating a path to my door.
I never said you would get to be an investment banker as a high school graduate. I said it was part of not
>I already knew you had no sympathy.
You're right - I have little sympathy for people who arrive at their destinations through their own choices.
Steve
"Or it could simply be made less expensive overall."
So, which scenario do you think is more likely to come to pass under the Democratic Party:
A) Legislation that reduces the cost of health care so that more people can afford it.
B) Legislation that simply taxes those of us already paying for our own health care to pay for everyone else?
I highly suspect that as usual the plan will be to enact taxes that I will have to pay for to create a subsidy program that I won't be able to partake in.
I'd probably vote Democratic in an instant if there was reassurance that the social programs created would be equally available to everyone, like a library. Unfortunately, it never works out that way. I'm expected to pay for it, but not allowed to use it.
Steve
You are exactly right!
Aside from the fact that few people are bargain hunting when their life is on the line, the main reason health care is expensive is because the bulk of the people who are paying for it (the insured) have no idea how much they are paying!
My wife and I just had a baby via C-section. Do you know how much it cost me? The whole shebang - hospital visit, surgeon, everything? $120.
How much did it really cost? About $14,000.
There is no incentive to shop around. If insurance companies said, "Look, we will give you $14,000 to have a baby. What you don't spend, you can keep!" people would be shopping around like crazy.
So long as the true costs of health care are hidden, costs will be sky-high.
Steve
The bottom line is, it's very easy not to be poor in this country. All you need to do is make some basic good decisions:
/choice/ to do these things, then odds are very good that you will not be poor for long.
/do/ the above but also /excel/ at them, the world can be your oyster.
/not/ to do these things, well, I'm afraid I don't feel much sympathy for how your life turns out.
- Stay in school and graduate from high school.
- Don't do drugs.
- Dont' get pregnant.
- Get a job - any job - and stick with it.
If you make the
If you have talent and ambition and can not just
If you make the choice
Steve
"So you'd be against spending $40 less each month with that being offset by government spending?
I guarantee you - that is not the way it will work.
Here is how it will work. Everyone who is "rich" enough to currently able to afford $50/month for broadband will continue to pay $50/month for their broadband. But their will now be a $5 tax on top of that used to pay for everyone else to get government subsidized broadband.
It's just like the "Universal Access Charge" on your phone bill. You're going to end up with a "Universal Access Charge" on your broadband bill.
If the Democrats could come up with social programs that I pay for but get to take advantage of, I might support them. But so far, most social programs just become additional taxes for me to pay on top of what I'm already paying to provide the services for myself.
Steve
America lags behind other countries that have universal broadband deployment, Pelosi said; but the Democrats' agenda "guarantees" that every American will have affordable access to broadband within five years.
Translation: People who can afford it today will continue to pay for it, plus we will pay more so that people who can't afford it will get it for free or a substantially reduced price.
You know, I could get behind some of the Democratic Party's socialist ideas if they applied to everyone. Unfortunately it seems like I'm always "too rich" to be on the receiving end of the benefits - I just get to pay for them.
You want to have free (as in beer) internet access for EVERYONE, like libraries? Great - I'm for that - I'll pay some taxes for that.
You want to add a tax somewhere so that I can continue to pay for internet access AND pay for everyone else to have it too? No thanks.
Democrats support "energy independence" within ten years; health care for all American within five years; and "dignified retirement" (no privatization of Social Security) through an "AmeriSave" plan.
I'm all for the energy independence. But my guess is that "health care for all" will really mean I will continue to pay for my own plus pay for everyone else under me. Likewise "diginified retirement" will mean in addition to saving my own funds for retirement I'll be taxed to provide savings for others to retire on, too."
It's hard enough to provide for my own health care and retirement!
I'm tired of being asked to pay for programs that I can't take advantage of myself. If I pay for it, I should have the same level and cost of access as anyone else - just like a library.
Steve
LEEEROOOOY! :)
Heh, yeah, my first armour was made from carpet.
P 9070007.JPG
I've come a long way, as have most, at least in this part of the US.
Here's me:
http://www.novae-militiae.com/Events/Atlanta2003/
Steve
http://www.sca.org/
There are local chapters damn near everywhere. A whole lot of us, at least "older" folks, got into this THROUGH D&D.
A lot of my SCA buds do games like D&D on a regular basis.
Steve
From TFA:
""If you're spending all your time on e-mail, you're not listening and reading," says Rogers, who rarely took lecture notes while he was a student so he could listen more intently. "I listen and read; e-mail is a huge distraction.""
Uh, I wonder how he thinks you are supposed to absorb email - osmosis?
Steve
"No, it shouldn't. Just because encryption is a very useful hammer does not mean that everything is a nail.
:)
Thanks to Moore's Law, encryption is cheap -- but it's still not free. That's OK for things like E-mail, where the two end-systems handle only a handful of messages at a time. But if the Web suddenly switched from HTTP to HTTPS overnight, Web servers would collapse left and right from having to juggle thousands of simultaneous encrypted connections. Plus, the overhead for setting up an encrypted link is much higher than an unencrypted link, thanks to things like session key negotiation; for short-lived sessions like most HTTP traffic, the cost of setting up the link would dwarf the cost of actually transmitting the data."
Would you please just stop complaining and just fix the problem? Thanks.
Seriously, though - Perhaps you missed it but I already said encryption takes computing power, which is why it isn't done by default today - only pages that require encryption currently get it. I understand today's limitations. I'm talking about the future.
"There are a lot of networking applications where the contents of the packets is just plain not worth protecting from sniffers. Things like multiplayer games and most Web surfing usually fall under that category. There's no reason to force the added overhead on those applications just because we can."
Most of the contents of things sent through the US mail are not worth protecting from people steaming them open, either. But the fact is, even things that ARE worth protecting are relatively secure simply because of the amount of effort it would take to try and examine all mail would be monstrous. Thus the whole system is relatively secure because of the level of effort required to distinguish the "good stuff" from the junk.
If all TCP/IP traffic were encrypted, you'd have the same situation. 99% of the stuff wouldn't be worth decrypting - but the 1% of stuff that was would never be found because you couldn't tell the junk from the "good stuff".
This would strengthen privacy, P2P sharing, VOIP, and totally take the wind out of the sails of the Telcos who want to use packet filtering to cripple the transmit speeds of content they don't like.
Steve
>I must be missing something. Is "to A from B" somehow different than "from B to A" ???
/said/ "windows to unix" - I think he meant "unix to windows" since I was saying our software was only available on Windows).
I'm not sure what you mean. The fellow was (I think) trying to lament how the CAD market was going from unix to Windows (though he
As I said - I don't care what platform the software runs on.
Steve
Hopefully, this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
Ultimately, ALL traffic should be encrypted, whether it is VOIP, email, web browsing, whatever.
The guy is right when on his home page he talks about how it is so difficult to implement this sort of stuff as an add-on for emails, managing keys and the like. It's why no one does it. Of course, there has always been a computing overhead, also, which is why only pages that "need" to be secured currently are. But as horsepower goes up, those limitations should go away.
Ultimately, it should be a matter of course before all traffic that goes in our out of your computer is encrypted by default.
Hopefully this is the start of something huge!
Steve
No, it is CoCreate OneSpace Designer.
>Its a shame the cad market is going to windows from unix.
I think you meant "from unix to windows"?
I'm not surprised. CAD is becoming more and more a commodity - it is currently running about $5000 a seat for stuff like SolidWorks or Pro/Engineer. There are less and less dollars to spend on things like multi-platform support.
Windows is the predominate desktop environment.
Personally, I don't care what the platform is.
Steve
Sorry, we are on Windows. They don't even write a *nix version of this software. Anyone know of a not-responding process monitoring app for Windows? Steve
Look, when I download a piece of software, I want to click "install", and start using it. I don't want to have to finish writing it before it will be useable on my computer.
/must/ be compiled to run, I shouldn't know anything about it happening - the compiler and the act of compilation should happen transparently to me.
/that/ running before I can get to compiling the program I really want to run, I won't be interested.
I don't know what the state of the art is for compiling code these days, but I know that when I download a program to use on my computer, I don't want to make a Computer Science project out of actually getting it to RUN on my computer. So if it
If I have to go out and download a compiler and who knows what else and get all of
Steve
...it can detect motionless user states...
But can it detect fap-fap-fap-fap-fap motion?
Perhaps it will usher in a new era of pr0n?
Steve
I'm looking for an application that will monitor a specified application and log how long the application is "not responding".
We use CAD (Computer Aided Design) software, and I would like to justify new hardware by being able to say how much less time we would have to spend waiting on the software if we had faster computers.
If I had a way to measure how often the cursor was an hourglass in our CAD software during the course of a standard workweek and then benchmark this on a new computer I could have a metric that I could use for justification.
Anyone know about anything like this?
Steve
"The irony of the NRA is that they continually argue that guns are vitally important to protecting our rights, but they've never used guns to achieve their aims. Instead, they show just how effective writing letters, donating money, and voting on the issues can really be."
If people out there really want to protect our rights, it's really simple, and it doesn't involve threatening to shoot people, shooting people, or getting shot. Just go to the polls this November...
The reason why we are able to "simply" go to the polls is because people used guns to give you that privilege.
You should be thankful that the system still works to the point that the NRA is still only encouraging us to use money, words, and votes, instead of bullets.
Steve
"The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed--where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once." - Judge Alex Kozinski
Vonage is using telco infrastructure to undercut a major telco profit center, without paying a them a dime for the privelege.
Wow, you mean Vonage gets free access to the Internet????? Amazing!
Look - the telco's ARE getting paid, and way more than a "dime". I'm paying $50 a month on my end to use the infrastructure, and God only knows how much Vonage is paying to use the infrastructure.
The telcos ARE getting paid.
Steve
I feel exactly the same way. Our current TV, the only one in the house, is an RCA 27" CRT that I was given back in 1998. As long as it works, and my DVD player works, I won't be buying anything else.
I'd love to have one of those big LCD TV/monitor things, but I can't afford $2000+ for a TV.
I also agree with you that all the DRM stuff and downgraded signals if you don't have all the right equipment is a huge turn-off for me.
But I suspect that your average Joe doesn't know about these problems and won't even be able to notice if they have a downgraded signal. They'll see "HDTV" on the box and assume that is what they are watching.
Steve
Yeah, I think this whole subscription thing to be able to use your VCR is a bunch of crap, too. I'm completely uninterested in such a thing.
Steve