> It's getting more difficult now that most of the TVs have been trashed.

Well, there's always "Plan B" once 3840x2100 monitors become affordable... at THAT resolution, you can literally emulate phosphor smear and misconvergence, to the point where it almost becomes indistinguishable from a "real" CRT. Increase the framerate to 240fps, and you can even emulate interlaced scanline fade (assuming the game wasn't what would now be called "240p60" with black scanline gaps).

10-15 years ago, video CDs and VCRs were popular in those same poor countries... with hardware and media costs roughly 2-4 times what a DVD player costs now. For the third world, optical media is actually ideal... you can store it under awful conditions, re-sell it almost without limit as long as it's not physically abused, and mail it for only slightly more than the cost of mailing a postcard.

Also, there's "poverty", and there's "Poverty(tm)". Even in countries with economies healthier than, say, Niger or Chad, there's a market for people who aren't necessarily living in desperate grinding poverty, but would nevertheless like to pick up an extra TV or two for other rooms in the house for less than what it would cost to buy a brand new LCD TV.

You're assuming that those same African consumers are buying them FOR aerial reception. DVD players aren't exactly luxury items anymore (I could walk into Wal Mart RIGHT NOW and buy a shit DVD player for about $25) and pirated DVDs of movies & TV shows are available in those countries for a pittance. I'd venture a guess that in the poorest countries, rural TV reception is barely worth bothering with ANYWAY, and most TV content gets delivered via sneakernet and open-air markets.

Also, most American CRT TVs from the 90s required little more to be capable of 576-line pseudo-NTSC than hacking the power supply to convert 220v@50hz into 120v@50hz. Analog CRTs had no fixed concept of resolution... they just swept scanlines over and over, bumping the timing a notch with each scanline, until they saw the vertical retrace signal or rolled over. They might not have had the dot pitch to properly display 576-line video without looking like shit... but that was part of the magic with analog stuff... there was a HUGE gulf between "what it was officially designed to do properly" and "what it could be coaxed into trying to do if you insisted".

Is there some technical reason why they stop at 3 strains, or is it purely a matter of cost? If it's just cost, why can't they offer more expensive flu shots that include more strains, to get the efficacy closer to 80%?

Or, for that matter, if vaccination for a particular strain conveys multi-year immunity, why can't they at least make two variants of influenza vaccine... one with the 3 strains they believe are likely to be the most *dangerous*, and another with the 3 worst strains that haven't been part of the cocktail for the past N years (so that if you got a flu shot every year, and it had N-year efficacy for those strains, after N-1 years you'd have some meaningful degree of immunity to at least 3n-3 different strains instead of just 3?

For what it's worth, "anchor babies" is another misleading term.

A baby born on US soil to a Mexican citizen in the US illegally enjoys automatic US citizenship, but it was established by the Supreme Court a few decades ago that being a child with US citizenship does NOT automatically convey a right to GROW UP on US soil unless at least one parent or legal guardian has US citizenship or residency. (I believe the Supreme Court's rationale was that a child needs a legal guardian, and since the constitution doesn't grant automatic citizenship to the PARENTS of US citizens, the child can't independently exercise his rights as a US citizen until he or she is legally an adult).

Under the best circumstances for the mother, her baby will be born in the US, get an official US birth certificate, then both will be deported to Mexico. 18 years later, the child can move to the US at will, but bringing his mother (or any other extended family member) will require demonstration of financial ability to support and sponsor the immigrant parent. In the end, all having an "anchor baby" really gives the mother is the ability to cut in front of other Mexican citizens and move to the front of the immigration line ahead of them.
immigration status.

[quote]But what are you going to do?[/quote]

Civil disobedience. Root your phone, reflash it to an AOSP- or AOKP-derived ROM, and configure it with an app that feeds invasive apps spoofed or sanitized data.

Quantum data transfer will probably end up succumbing to the same kind of catch-22/gotcha that plagues realtime digital filtering of analog waveforms...

a) Analog filtering introduces phase changes due to delays. When digitally-filtering a waveform, the length of time you have to sample it to get enough to analyze and transform ends up introducing basically the same phase shift an analog filter would have caused.

b) Quantum data transfer has "1 in 100 million" odds of actually working for any particular attempt. Obviously , lots of forward error correction will be needed to both detect and fix errors. My prediction is that the time the required error-correction overhead adds to the transmission time will end up being basically equal to the time it would have taken to transmit the data at the speed of light.

c) In both cases, the limit will apply primarily to realtime uses. Using the audio example, if you try to apply a digital high-pass/low-pass filter to audio for something like a subwoofer, you'll basically create the same phase shift you would have had anyway... but if you have the luxury of buffering playback so that you have time to completely analyze the signal & can delay the OTHER signals to bring them back into temporal alignment with the filtered signal, you can enjoy the best of both worlds... infinite-slope filtering with zero induced phase shift. In the context of quantum data transfer, it will fail at the goal of "faster than light" throughput, but might nevertheless find utility as a way to transport data in non-realtime under circumstances that would render "normal" electromagnetic radio modulation schemes unusable.

At some point, if there are enough consumers living beyond Earth orbit to commercially matter to normal web sites (or their future equivalent), the most logical step would be to allow web applications to bundle themselves and their data in a way that allows the web app ITSELF to be automatically deployed to a remote virtual server closer to the end user & sync its mirror of the database with the authoritative one back on earth (multicasting most of the replicated data from earth to elsewhere & caching it blindly at the local end to the greatest extent possible).

The basic technology already exists today (think: .war files and databases with replication, load-balancing, and hot failover), but the number of users (say, passengers on a cruise ship) is too small relative to the expense & currently-insurmountable licensing barriers (Oracle isn't going to start making "replicant" licenses for Oracle and MySQL available that would be remotely cost-effective anytime soon).

A lot of people forget that the annoying habit some websites have of using AJAX to send data nonstop keystroke-by-keystroke is a plague of fairly recent origin. There's no reason why web applications HAVE to be written that way. If latency is high, but bandwidth is abundant, it makes more sense to satisfy the request by bulk-sending everything the requestor is likely to want anytime soon, and do it in a way that allows it to be cached locally for the benefit of others who might make the same request later.

The thing is, if cable/satellite went to true a-la-carte, any short-term savings would be rapidly neutralized by skyrocketing per-channel costs. Instead of paying $89.95/month for 200-300 channels, you'd be paying $84.99/month for 17 specific channels. Someone who literally watched only one or two channels might come out ahead, but the cable industry would make sure that most of us were at least as fucked as we are now, and would use it as an opportunity to fuck other customers just a little bit harder. It's depressing, but deep down inside, we all *know* it's true.

There's another category nobody in the industry even wants to TALK about (besides complaining about the costs, then passing them straight along to customers) -- the fees paid to local channels that insist on payment in lieu of "must-carry". IMHO, the FCC should amend the "must-carry" rule to REQUIRE cable/satellite providers to break out the total amount they'd otherwise have to collectively pay the local channels, and allow customers to opt out of paying that fee in return for having to use an antenna to watch local channels. The probably couldn't get away with demanding a breakdown of channel-by-channel fees due to nondisclosure rules, but if they disclosed their aggregate cost, it wouldn't really reveal much. I can almost *guarantee* that cable/satellite customers who don't live in New York City would begin opting out EN MASSE if they started seeing line items on their bills like "Local Affiliate Rebroadcast Fees - $17.47 (optional)". In the short terms, the local affiliates would probably raise prices for the remaining customers who don't want to bother with an antenna... but the higher they raised them, the more cable/satellite customers would be motivated to opt out of the fees and switch to OTA reception for them.

> And why shouldn't we count satellite and wireless?

Satellite is broadband for the damned & desperate.

I really wish cable/satellite would adopt "Chinese Menu" pricing for their mid-tier, and allow people who don't care about Disney*.* or ESPN*.* to pay the same price, but substitute HBO and/or Showtime instead (ie, pick two out of four... Disney, ESPN, HBO, Showtime... 3 for $10 more, all 4 for $18 more). I believe it would mostly be revenue-neutral for the cable/satellite companies, and would go a long way towards softening the sting of my monthly cable bill by letting me substitute two channels I don't currently pay for, but would LOVE to get instead of two expensive blocks of channels I never watch.

The problem with many of OCZ's drives (like the Vertex2 and Agility2) was that traditional RAID wouldn't save you because whatever killed drive #1 could (and often did) kill one or more of your OTHER drives, too.

The fault lies 100% with OCZ. They omitted the supercapacitor that Sandforce's engineers intended to keep it powered up if it unexpectedly lost power during a write, and they compiled their drivers to NOT use the multi-step write strategy that a drive without backup power needed in order to write safely and recover gracefully from power loss (because multi-step writes killed performance).

I don't know about him, but in my case, I happen to like having 5GHz 802.11ac with beamforming. The last time I checked, every open firmware in existence for the AC68U has broken support for 5GHz 802.11ac and its advanced radio features.

It's not so much "tough" as "the goddamn solder paste has to be kept refrigerated until you're ready to use it, then goes bad within a few days of warming it up to room temperature". Throwing away mostly-full syringe after syringe of solder paste after you used maybe 0.5mL of it to solder one chip gets expensive after a while.