Warp wrote:
> Bill Pragnell <bil### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
>> Hmmm. There's nothing particularly unique about humans.
> 
>   Except that there are billions of them.
> 
>> What about monkeys?
> 
>   Extint?

Bet they weren't before the machines took over. Anyway, I'm not saying 
it's demonstrably impossible, it's just very weak, and very obviously a 
poorly-thought-out backstory. The Wachowskis do not care whether it's 
plausible or not. The only explanations are desperate retrofitting.

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Darren New wrote:


> Maybe I'm dense, but I'm not sure I understand what a wind storm has to 
> do with whether the TV is broadcast in analog or digital. Was it shaking 
> the tower too much or something? Or did it knock down the digital 
> antenna? Was the problem at the arena or the broadcaster?

If it's a wind storm, and it's affecting the picture, it's likely they 
have "Big" satellite dishes, (possibly the little directTV ones, too... 
dunno) being buffeted by the wind, causing the signal quality to vary. 
Long ago, my family had a big dish, and moderate wind was enough to 
cause the analog signal to degrade momentarily. Do this with digital 
and, well.. you know what happens.

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Warp wrote:
>   I recently was at a home where they were watching TV and I got to watch
> it from really close. I was shocked at the bad quality of the image! It was
> full of mpeg compression artifacts. It was almost like watching a youtube
> video in full-screen.

This is a big problem with our cable system. They cram so much 
interactive on-demand garbage down the pipe that normal channels tend to 
suffer, due to decreased bandwidth. I've had several instances where 
certain movies are unwatchable because the scenes are dark, and have a 
lot of movement, which causes the image to break up into random chunks 
of barely discernible murk.

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Mike Raiford <mra### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> I've had several instances where 
> certain movies are unwatchable because the scenes are dark, and have a 
> lot of movement, which causes the image to break up into random chunks 
> of barely discernible murk.

  Welcome to the future.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Mike Raiford wrote:

> I've had several instances where 
> certain movies are unwatchable because the scenes are dark, and have a 
> lot of movement, which causes the image to break up into random chunks 
> of barely discernible murk.

Apparently I don't watch as much TV, or my TV set is just so crappy I 
can't tell the difference... None of the things everybody else is 
describing are familiar to me.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Warp wrote:

> 
>   Welcome to the future.
> 

Where's my flying car?

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Orchid XP v7 wrote:

> Apparently I don't watch as much TV, or my TV set is just so crappy I 
> can't tell the difference... None of the things everybody else is 
> describing are familiar to me.

Do you use digital cable (satellite) tv, or digital over the air 
broadcasts? I'm seeing it on the CATV a lot here, especially for the 
secondary and tertiary premium channels (primary, and primary HD look 
acceptable)

FWIW, compression artifacts on digital OTA usually aren't that bad, save 
for the 2 idiot stations that have 3 streams in addition to their main 
broadcast. (Do we really need a Forecast channel, a Radar channel, and 
an airport camera?)

Yeah, I have an HDTV which magnifies compression artifacts as well as 
the problems with analog TV.

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Mike Raiford <mra### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:

> >   Welcome to the future.
> > 

> Where's my flying car?

  Right next to the 1000000x1000000x1000000 pixel holographic display.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Mike Raiford wrote:
> Warp wrote:
>>   Welcome to the future.
> Where's my flying car?

They said there'd be flying cars!  I WANT MY FLYING CAR!

www.moller.com  <- over there.

The three biggest problems with flying cars are thus:
- noise
- disaster handling
- traffic flow logistics

Noise wouldn't be a problem if we had some nice antigrav field, 
passenger aircraft will always have more issues than land vehicles when 
something goes wrong, and once good anti-collision routines exist, the 
rest is whether or not the red tape will allow Joe Schmoe to just pick 
up and run around the sky from his driveway.

-- 
Tim Cook
http://empyrean.digitalartsuk.com

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Mike Raiford wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> 
>>
>>   Welcome to the future.
>>
> 
> Where's my flying car?

I got mine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9HhktCTMNY

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