"Why TV news in the US is utter rubbish."

[sweetheart]

A worthwile article -> someone said the obvious!

Why TV news in the US is utter rubbish.

So where do you get your news while living in the US? News-starved Americans usually hold up National Public Radio, NPR, as the best option. But with interlude music fresh from the 1920s and a twee, kitchen-table-chat approach, this is news wrapped in a tea cosy.

Two comedy programmes, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, fill a peculiar niche of serious analysis with gags and are possibly the main news source for people under 30. They both viciously lampoon the news media, which pretends not to notice and runs clips from them on their own shows.
There is hope however. The non-news cycle is increasingly being broken by the internet. Thanks to cheap digital technology and fast net connections, online video is a simple prospect and means it is possible to get your fix of moving images with real news thrown in.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...selections2008

[Virgil]

There has always been talk of convergence of monitor and television. http://www.surfthechannel.com/ is an example of a video aggregate website. Televion shows are played right there in full screen in hopes of expanding an audience. Recent movies are sometimes available for free for a while and then shifted to a website that sells content. Netflix and Blockbuster bring about a convergence too with their downloads and even the major networks put up their content on their website.

When the digital age becomes ubiquitous by the dropping of analog television this nextFebruary 17th we have the second coming of convergence. The SSD drives are making their way into what I call the coffee table computers. There used not be coffee tables in peoples living rooms and then came the television. Now the coffee table and the television are calling the computer that joins them. The ASUS eee 900 is an example of what 9" of what a 9 inch screen will do. Now lets say everyone has a 2 gig USB zip drive with some video content on it where that USB device is $12.99 this Friday at Staples. They fit on a key chain and are affordable to everyone now. You have mobile content by everyone.

Convergence 2.0 is coming because wireless projection from extremely mobile devices and even more mobile content is going to get projected on to that big screen in the living room. When nothing is on someone can pull out their wireless computer and ask everyone for their keychain movie. There will be keychain video parties and that convergence will break the chains of the controlled media.

The cell phone will evolve into a coffee table computer that needs only voice commands to project the video on its SSD or USB drive. The coffee table is the center of future change. People should think of this when I say that the largest anti-treason army out there is the Free Cannabis Army. Smoking cannabis is best understood when you see it as an activity and an activity that is not interrupted by other activity. Here is a question for you "What is the largest group of people that you have ever passed had in passing around a joint or two?"

[Virgil]

X10 is already selling to people wanting their video content shown on a television- http://www.x10.com/homepage.htm

$49.95- PC to tv, the complete kit- http://www.x10.com/promotions/ur86a_...a_v5_home.html

[sweetheart]

For most people, a coffee table computer would better serve them as its 100%
for entertainment like the TV was before it became antiquated. Now, the projectors
are sure to overtake all screens in short time as the preferred lightweight flexible
screens of future. I hope the next desktop PC i get has a projector instead of a
screen (i already gotz a gazillion old screens from all the dead PC's of my life going
back to 1979)... the apple2E. -> Brrrrrruuupp Brrrruuuuupp... those disk drives used to
make a real racket... we're spoiled at boot time these days compared to the old times.

Heck, booting micros is easy, minis were a pain, PDP 11/8's, 10's PDP 11/40's, PDP 11/44's,
Tandem TXP's, VLX's, sun sparc1, sparc2, ++ plus booting subsystems like sybase, oracle and the very high level SAP-like systems of today that operate whole businesses on a primary single instance.... and finally, they're getting the fucking coffee table
working so that people can use the channel clikker to work youtube and the sites.

The best purchase i made for this PC was a marshall amp that's plugged in as the speaker... every time i see the marshall speaker with the logo, it makes me smile from 10,000 great guitar riffs... and the speaker has amazing presence... some day, the guitar, the amp, the speaker, the format, the PC, the TV and the telephone will all converge, until then, the standards will keep changing.

Youtube is enough -> just the corporates now own the indexing system so that
underground means "buried"... following the maxim... don't expect corporations to
support a marxist utopia.

[Virgil]

Here is a $399 Acer notebook with a small screen. Computers already transmit wirelessly. The big change will be in monitors, and in this case it might easily be a 17 inch monitor in the bedroom or in the kitchen. Just turn on your coffee table computer and varry it with you. The merger of projector to a wireless computer is ultimate, voice commanded of course.

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/images/product/10008958.jpg
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/Produc...tCode=10008958