That's as silly as saying you should be able to go whatever speed you want on the interstates since, after all, you, the People, own them.

The people may very well punish their officials for their management of the spectrum, but that's all it is: political punishment for management. There's no rights involved here, the officials are tasked with proper management, and if they don't properly manage they get replaced.

It hasn't the first thing to do with "the People" or having anything "stolen" from them. These converter boxes are not an attempt to make people whole. It's all just a political calculation whereby the politicians attempt to manage the spectrum and not get fired.

Did the government take the channels from the people with TVs? Did the government walk into their houses, pick up the channels, and walk out? Maybe the consumers left the channels there sitting in their front yard, so the government walked away with them without even a police escort.

No: the government declared its control over all spectrum long ago. These people who are lining up for converters didn't own the spectrum; the government didn't take it from them. They didn't even have the right to broadcast on the spectrum.

So how can one claim that they're owed for their loss? They didn't lose!

The actual mechanisms of the deal are beside the point. You say it was sold to the private entities; others say it was only leased and in fact could not be sold. That sort of detail just doesn't matter.

Fact is, this spectrum wasn't owned by the people with the TV sets. They had no right to the spectrum, and no guarantee that it would remain reserved for analog broadcast, so that was not taken from them.

The broadcasters had a right to the spectrum: they had arranged with the government to insert their signal into a slice of the spectrum. If anyone is having the spectrum taken away, it's the broadcasters.

In the end the consumers bought analog TVs and gambled that they would continue to be compatible going into the future. They had no guarantee that they would be, and so they are owed nothing.

We should have given these people a few years' notice that analog TV would become obsolete, and then encouraged--not required--broadcasters to provide converters to consumers. After all, the consumers are a fundamental part of the broadcasters' business model and they have every reason to want viewers to keep on watching.

But redirecting money (tax dollars or lost revenue from the sale, it doesn't matter) so that these people can have TV? Give me a break.

This is nothing but welfare from a political perspective and a subsidy from a fiscal perspective.

Um.

Go back and read what I wrote and try again.

That's weird... I could have sworn I was at least four digits.

RACISM!

The representatives have to answer to angry voters with non-working tvs. Right. That part is true.

The rest of what you said is complete hogwash, a proposed train of logic that has no rational basis.

You might as well propose that all corporate tax revenue collected from TV-related businesses must be spent on TV as well. After all, the word "TV" is right there in the description of where it comes from, right? So it makes sense!

The representatives have to answer to their constituents, and they feel like insulating themselves with this coupon program. That's the entire basis for this program; it has nothing to do with where the funding is coming from or any philosophical notion of making them whole. It's pure political maneuvering.

We're in a recession, there have been mass layoffs, unemployment is nearing 10%... and yet having access to free TV broadcasts at the expense of anyone wanting to use the freed up spectrum isn't really going to help any of those things.

So you're saying the spectrum was wide open and unregulated before this taking?

No. The government has had the spectrum under its power for quite a while. It's tasked with managing the spectrum on behalf of the people, and it decided that proper management includes turning it digital. There was no taking from the people anytime recently, and the "making them whole" argument only applies to the original taking.

If you want to make people whole then you're working to replace their ability to TRANSMIT, since that's what was taken from them decades ago. They never had any right to RECEIVE analog signals; that was never taken from them.

So what should they receive in return for their lost right to transmit on the now government controlled spectrum? Probably not much... so you might as well not bother with any personal payouts and just roll the money on into benefits coming from the general fund.

But what about the money the government received from the recent auctions? Well, since the spectrum was already in government hands when that auction went through--and in fact was a result of continuing government management--there's absolutely no reason that the people have some priority right to that money. It should go into the general funding of government like everything else, to be used as the elected officials see fit.

So no, the "make them whole" argument doesn't work. Handing out converter boxes is just another form of welfare and vote buying.

If you did that you'd see immediate complaints of racism.

That is an absolutely irrelevant point.

It's not like the sale of bandwidth was in exchange for twenties marked with a "do not use except for converter boxes!" sign. There's absolutely no reason the government couldn't have applied that money toward road building, school funding, or (heaven forbid) letting taxpayers keep an equal amount of their own money.

That argument doesn't really work.

Buying converter boxes for the general public just doesn't have much to do with the loss suffered by the general public in the seizure. In particular, the government received payment from the companies for the asset, and in theory it is using that money for the general welfare... which doesn't necessarily have anything at all to do with converter boxes.

Watching TV is necessary for the GOVERNMENT's well-being.

Opiate of the masses and all.

As you said, they bought the chunk of the spectrum. As in, they handed over money.

Once they hand the money over, man, it's gone. No longer theirs.

Listen to yourself: "generic workaround API development"? Really? The simple keyword "workaround" is a pretty striking clue that these engineering issues aren't aesthetic.

As for hole punching, I hear often that it's very successful, reliable, even easy to do. And yet in my personal life I'm struck by instance after instance of myself, my friends, family, and coworkers hitting up against non-working software where the problem can be tracked back to failed hole-punching.

It's one of those "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" things: everyone says holepunching works, but I see first hand from a wide variety of programs, in a wide variety of environments, operated by a variety of independent users, that it fails 90% of the time.

Then, I try to look research the issue in software I run myself only to find developers insisting that there is no bug while I myself can't find them either.

So who am I to believe? My own experience, based on far more than a few isolated occasions, shows pretty conclusively that hole punching doesn't work reliably.

You've overemphasized small problems here and underemphasized large ones.

"A bit of glue to tie NAT-and-firewall-hole-punching"? Really? It's just that easy?

What about the serious problems with NAT hole punching, it's unreliability and complexity due to details of the particular NAT implementation? What about the policy issues of firewall hole punching? These aren't trivial problems to overcome; we've been trying to get various hole punching techniques to work for years and it's still crappy, unreliable, and un-userfriendly.

NATs don't suck for aesthetic reasons; they suck because they get in the way of operation and have to be worked around through the use of voodoo and luck.