What if there was a way to organize everyone’s photographs into a database we could all share and use in ways we never imagined?
Google Maps Street View is a 3D database of photos organized by location. What if we used the street locations to pin copies of our photographs? What if we made Street View 4D, so not only could we walk up and down virtual streets, we could walk up and down them in the past?
Here’s a March 2011 Street View photo of a house my family moved into in 1958, and left just after JFK was killed in November, 1963.
And here’s a picture of me, Patty, my sister Becky, and Jodie taken Christmas 1958.
As you can see, they have remodeled the house so that it doesn’t look the same (note the faucet in both photos).
Here’s another picture with my sister and Patty older, along with my neighbor Michael Kevin Ralph who lived in the house with the awnings.
How many people have lived in that house in the last 50 years? What if we all pinned our photographs to that house in Street View? I have no photographs of the inside of that house, but I’d love to look inside it. Maybe Michael Kevin Ralph’s mother took some photos when were there. I have a photo of a birthday party at Patty’s house down the street.
I could use Street View to walk up and down S.W. 37th Street, Hollywood, Florida and see old friends. I often think of that old Lake Forest neighborhood. I could follow the way we walked to school and see photographs that were taken in long forgotten classrooms, or to the 7-Eleven or Kwik-Chek were we bicycled to get Cokes and RC Colas.
Not only would this let us return to past locations, but if we find photos pinned to old locations we might find old friends to reconnect with. I wonder if Patty or Michael Kevin ever visits this street on Street View?
What if I wanted to go to New York City in the 1930s. There must have been millions of photographs taken along its streets. What if I wanted to visit where my father grew up in downtown Miami in the 1920s and 1930s. How many photographs were taken in those years that could be pinned in this database?
If enough photographs were tagged to Street View eventually we’d have Street View maps of the past. We could even walk into homes if we had the photos. If we had enough photographs we could stitch them together in virtual reality simulations.
Not only could we leave photographs, but we could notes and annotate locations with our memories.
Can you imagine what we could all do with such an invention?
Many Republicans are drawn to simplified tax plans that use graduated flat tax rates for federal income taxes. I’m a liberal, but I also find the idea interesting. Now the chance of such a system being implemented is very close to zero, but it’s still an interesting topic.
Why do simplified tax systems have no chance? Well, if we had a flat tax, there would be no deductions. Levying tax breaks gives lawmakers power. Law makers have various forms of power. They can regulate and not regulate, they can tax and not tax, they can spend and not spend. If we went to a flat tax our leaders would lose one-third of their tools of power. Can you imagine that?
If we went to a flat tax system think of how many millions of people we’d put out of work. First, many that work at the IRS would be added to the unemployment rolls. But then think of all those bean counters and lawyers that work at corporations whose careers depend on finding tax loopholes, those people wouldn’t be needed either. Then companies like Turbo Tax and HR Block would go out of business too. And think of all those little people who do people’s taxes every year would also be out of work. And what about lobbyists? There would be less work for them too.
All-in-all, if we went to a flat tax system it would put millions out of work. Our complicated system of federal taxes is a never-ending economic stimulus package. Is getting rid of it even possible?
The government could enact a flat tax so we didn’t even have to prepare annual tax forms – just take their cut in every income transaction. They could come up with a graduated flat tax so most people would end up paying the same or less than what they do now and the government would earn just as much money without all the complications. Most advocates hope they would pay less and that tax cheaters would pay more, and the privilege would pay the same as the those people without influence. Of course that means those with connection to power would pay a lot more. Are they really going to back such a system?
Theoretically, a flat tax would be fairer, until lawmakers tried to reintroduce the first exception, then it would get complicated all over again. A flat tax depends on lawmakers giving up their power to help certain groups or endeavors with tax breaks. Will that ever happen? I don’t think so. Can you imagine such a world? Businesses couldn’t wheel and deal for favors.
And what if this extended to states and cities. One tax for all. How could states entice companies into their borders without tax break incentives? But wouldn’t that also be fairer for competition if everyone had to pay the same taxes? Could we survive in a society where all individuals and corporations were treated absolutely the same by the taxman?
People get home mortgage deductions because the government wants people to own homes. That kind of social influence would be over. Is that good or bad?
What if the government eliminated tax havens and all other forms of “legal” tax evasions so there was no way to to skip out on taxes. Just kill off accounting chicanery, tax-law loopholes, or off-shore three-card Monte, and the issue of how much people or corporations paid in taxes were no longer an issue for debate – could we handle such a society?
For people who take the standard deduction every year a flat tax wouldn’t be a big deal, but for those people delight in adding up their deductions and lowering their tax bill, a flat tax might be a bummer. Some people hate to pay taxes and will do anything they can to lower their tax bills. If they can’t shoot for zero taxes I doubt they will be happy. What happens if everyone pays the same? I think a certain percentage of the population would revolt at such egalitarianism.
And should everyone pay the same? Do some people do things for society that merits lowering their taxes? Will the go-getters of society be happy if their efforts are taxed in a higher bracket than the indolent? All flat tax proposals depend on the idea that the poor pay a flat rate less than the rich. Could we come up with a rate and rational that will satisfied the rich? Currently the rich live in higher tax brackets, but they get the chance to lower their taxes with our complicated tax system. If we had a simple system, there would be no hope for them.
Right now the rich protest they pay at a higher tax rate than the poor, so they are being penalized as individuals. We could think of that in another way, we could create a flat tax saying that norm for all humans is to make $100,000 a year. If you are unfortunate enough to make less we’ll put you in a lesser tax rate for your suffering. But should someone making $250,000,000 a year pay at a different rate than someone making $100,000 or $10,000? Are we taxing the person or the income? Is a rich person different form a poor person in the eyes of the law? We could consider income like pollution. The bigger the impact you have on the environment, the more taxes you pay. It’s actually very hard to justify how to tax people. If a person only makes $14,000 and the government makes them pay $1,400, is that the same as someone who makes $140,000 and has to pay $14,000, or someone who makes $140,000,000 and has to pay $14,000,000. Does 14 million hurt as much to a super-rich person as $1,400 hurt someone on minimum wages? But if the super-rich have a 20% flat tax, they’d be paying $28,000,000. They’d still have $112,000,000 to spend that year, whereas the poor person would only have $11,200.
See how hard it is to make a fair tax system. I suppose we could add up all the expenses for the country and then divide by the 313,000,000 people who live here, and everyone pay their fair share. But then many people would owe more than they earn. That’s why the rich have to pay more.
As far as I can foresee, I can’t imagine a flat income tax system ever passing Congress.
Pay attention to machines around you. Pretend you’re Darwin observing their habits. It’s pretty obvious they’re evolving, and they have a parasitic relationship with us. Biological life arose in the medium of water, machines are rising out of an ocean of humanity. Most people think of evolution only in terms of biology, but it can be applied to cosmology, particle physics, and now mechanical evolution. Scientists have often wondered if life could be based on something other than carbon, well, we’re seeing beings of silicon evolve right in front of our eyes.
The First Law: Machines Are Becoming More Intelligent
Like single cell animals being outwitted by multi-cell organisms, and the animal kingdom being dominated by humans, machine evolution is moving towards smarter machines replacing dumber. Generally we think of machines as getting more complex or having more features, but if you compare an iPhone to an old rotary phone, it is more complex, does more, but more than that, it’s far smarter. We call them smartphones and dumb phones, and the dumb phones are going extinct.
The Second Law: Machines Are Becoming More Functional
Machines that do more are replacing machines that do less. Modern sewing machines can do what once took several machines. Modern refrigerators are no longer just boxes of cold. A smartphone replaces a cell phone, portable GPS, MP3 player, PDA, camera, video camera, organizer, watch, alarm clock and could replace a laptop and ebook for some users. My desktop ate my CD player, record player, radio and typewriter. I can’t tell if my computer is going to eat the TV, or if the TV will eventually eat the computer. Even a simple machine like a knife evolves to serve more functions.
The Third Law: Machines Are Evolving Towards Simplicity
Machines want to have fewer parts, especially ones that don’t move. Charles Babbage tried to build a machine that was too mechanically complex to survive. 19th century machines were overwhelmingly complex, they had to evolve into simpler machine we saw in the 20th century. But even those machines are too complex. Soon solid state drives will replace hard discs, and people will abandon all forms of optical drives. Floppy drives disappeared long ago. But even more mechanical machines like washers, dryers, cars, HVACs, etc. are moving towards fewer moving parts. Clocks used to be marvels of complexity, and now they are solid state circuits. Electric cars have far fewer parts than gasoline powered automobiles.
The Fourth Law: Machines Are Evolving Towards Efficiency
A Kindle ebook can last weeks on one charge. A Toyota Prius uses less gas than a Edsel. A modern air conditioner uses a fraction of electricity than a unit back in the 1950s used. Modern jetliners can fly further and faster on less fuel than their ancestors.
The Fifth Law: Machine Evolution is Driven by Humans
Human evolution was driven by survival of the fittest adapting to changing environments. Machines evolve though the competitive needs of people. One day they will evolve from their own competitive nature, but until then humans are the driving force of machine evolution. Ultimately we’ll cross breed and form cyborgs.
In recent years TV makers have been adding features from the Internet (Netflix, Pandora, etc.) to their sets and calling them Smart TVs. Let’s imagine the trend continuing so that we have Genius TVs – what features would they have? Do we really want them?
Right now we have many devices, services, apps, sites that all work in different ways. Smart devices are ones where two technologies blend together, like Bluetooth consoles in cars recognizing Bluetooth smartphones so you can have hands free phone calls while driving. To make them smarter, they can also be GPS screens, rear view videos, engine monitoring, radios, CD players, etc. Genius devices are one that blend in many technologies and make them work together. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Broadband, USB, TCP/IP are all enabling technologies that bring electronic devices together.
In a way, all of this is very scary because we’re making machines smarter and smarter. If you’ve ever read John Varley’s classic story, “Press Enter ■” you’ll know what I mean, but for right now we’re all rushing headlong into convergence of intelligent machines. Most people love their gadgets but often get overwhelmed in how to manage them. That’s why inventors work so hard to let machines talk to one another so they can figure out how to work together without human intervention.
This also reminds me of scenes from the dystopian film Fahrenheit 451, based on the classic Ray Bradbury novel, and of course, Big Brother screens in Nineteen Eighty-Four. I’m in love with gadgets, but such gadgets haven’t always been portrayed well in science fiction. And there was HAL 9000 of course.
Our machines are getting smarter to make it easier for us to be dumber.
Here’s an example. When I sat up my new Roku I had to add each channel I wanted, and for each channel the Roku would give me a code that I had to enter in at a web browser. For Netflix I went to http://www.netflix.com/roku and entered the code, and then went back to the Roku to see that I had been validated. In the future I could validate my identity with the Roku, and then it could go down its lists of channels and automatically check with each service to see if I had an account and configure the Roku device for me. The smarter Roku would know more about me, and have access to my accounts.
With a Genius TV, I should be able to identify myself and it should configure itself automatically for everything I like to do with its designed features. It will be a video phone, and so it will get my contacts from the cloud, so I can say, “Call Connell” and it will know who I want. Or I could say, “Take me to the next episode of Breaking Bad I want to watch” or “I want to look at all the photographs of my father” and it would know what I want to do. Of course, I’ll be developing a symbiotic relationship with my Genius TV.
If you’ve ever used the program Zite on the iPad you’ll know how a program can consolidate your interests with articles appearing on the Internet each day. I should be able to tell my Genius TV that I’m interested in learning about how people lived in Boston from 1850-1875 and it would go get me diaries, photos, newspaper articles, books, etc., and format them in an interesting way to process all the data. This goes way beyond Google. I’m talking about a digital Jeeves like in the P. G. Wodehouse books who is smarter than me, and who can take care of all my needs. Siri is the first step to a Genius TV. But what if we all had our own personal Siri that really knew us?
A Genius TV must be completely Internet aware, not just design to work with a few services like a Roku box. It needs to be voice activated. It needs to integrate with my Internet provider, phone provider, my TV provider, broadband provider, my cloud services, my home security provider, utility provider, security cams, home network, cameras, and even local over-the-air TV and radio. I mean, this sucker’s got to be aware of everything. Before we all run headlong into this future, I really do recommend reading “Press Enter ■” if you can find a copy. [There are no legal copies I can link to, but just remember my warning. There are dangers to the future we’re all heading into.]
We won’t have an Einstein level Genius TV for years, but TVs on sale today are getting smarter all the time. So this essay should help you think about the possibilities the next time you buy a new TV. The simple way to look at it is to think about what devices that you own now that you can eliminate. Think how smartphones have eliminated so many older gadgets, well the same thing will happen to smart and genius TVs.
Here’s all the devices that’s connected to my current entertainment center in my den.
56” TV
Blu-ray player
CD/SACD player
Receiver
Roku
Home Theater PC
Old game unit
Ethernet switch
5 speakers
I picture a Genius TV being a larger wall mounted screen with maybe or maybe not a visible speaker bar, and that’s it. Elegant and simple. It can see me and I can talk to it.
I can buy the physical setup now if I’m willing to give up CD/DVD/BD discs and go without the computer and better sound I get from the receiver/amp. Right now Smart TVs don’t have PCs built into them. My current HTPC is bigger than the receiver, but I could buy one that’s smaller than a Mac Mini. Music, movies and radio are all available via a computer now, so I could do a lot of consolidation now by buying a smart TV from Sony or Samsung, and a Zotac mini-PC.
I could fake the start of a Genius TV by buying a Smart TV and adding a small computer like this one,
However, a real Genius TV will have a fully functional computer built-in. An iPad screen has more pixels than a HD TV, and smartphones and tablets now have 2 and 4 core CPUs. They are small and getting smaller and cheaper. Adding one to a TV set is a no brainer. Just think of of a smart TV as a 60” iPad. Once you have a computer inside your TV you are connected to the world. You don’t need a stereo receiver to get local AM/FM radio because you can get internet radio from all around the Earth. TVs are built with 5.1 surround sound now, so we can jettison the receiver. See how it eliminates older devices?
Most people have already given up CDs and DVDs, and BDs never really caught on. But we’ll also give up game discs, paper photographs, and even paper personal records, books, newspapers and magazines. The closer we get to Genius TVs, the less clutter we should have in our lives. We’ll have different size screens. Now’s the time to ask if this is good or not, because we’re already moving in this direction as fast as inventors can invent. Machines have eaten our music, and they are about to eat our books.
Contemplate everything you use a TV or video screen for now. How could you converge all of these activities into one elegant device? One that would integrate or replace your other devices. You’d still need a smartphone, and maybe a tablet, but all the TVs and computers in your house could be replaced by a Genius TV in each room, like the wall screens in the houses in the classic film Fahrenheit 451 shown above.
What all do you do with your TV, computer, phones and other gadgets in the house now?
Watch over-the-air TV
Watch cable/satellite/broadband TV
Watch DVD/Blu-ray discs
Watch Roku, AppleTV or similar Internet TV devices
Play video games with Xbox, Wii, Playstation
Use a computer connected to your TV or display
Skype
Video picture frames
Play family videos
Look at family photos
Listen to AM/FM/satellite music with a receiver hooked to TV
Listen to subscription music via the internet
Listen to ripped music on a hard drive
Watch pay-per-view TV
Run computer programs
Use tablet/smartphone apps
Use smartphone
Read books
Take an online course
Play DVD courses from The Teaching Company, or other educational training
Record shows with DVR
Medical monitoring
Web cameras
Security cameras
Okay, you get the picture. Now think of the electronic components involved:
Screen with 1920×1080 resolution
TV tuner
Ethernet networking, wired or wireless
Cable/satellite tuner
Roku/AppleTV/etc. tuner
Computer
Sound/speakers
Hard drive
DVD/Blu-ray drives
Lots of clickers to control each device
Computers, tablets, ebooks, smartphones, GPSes, etc.
But let’s simplify this system.
1920×1080 screen (or 2048×1536 or 4096×2160)
Electronic brain – or TV/CPU
Soundbar
Like the old component stereo systems of old, it’s easier to build and maintain a system from parts, that way you can upgrade or replace any part without replacing the whole. The TV/CPU would have components itself. Power supply, motherboard, memory, SSD drive. It’s time to get away from optical drives, so let’s just assume our Genius TV won’t use DVD or Blu-ray, but the TV/CPU could have a slot for a drive for be backward compatible for those people who collected thousands discs and can’t part with them.
Den and living screens would be wall mounted, and they would include a video camera. I picture soundbars now, but even they could be shrunk or hidden so all we see is the big screen. That leaves us to imagine the TV/CPU. They could be designed to easily hide in various kinds of furniture or also wall mounted. They would need two wires, one for the power and the other for TV/Internet, which is now coax, but that wire could be redesigned into a wireless network. Computers are becoming powerful enough, and wireless networking fast enough, that we might only need one TV/CPU brain to control all the screens in the house. Our Genius TV could be completely hidden away, near where the fiber optic cable comes in from the street.
Of course, the controllers (clickers, keyboards, mice, game controls, motion sensors) for each screen in the house would be wireless, and we’d need them until which time we perfect human-machine verbal communication, and the video cameras that watch us can read our every movement and intent. One day it will be just intelligent screens and people.
I think TVs should have full computer power, but not need Apple or Microsoft operating systems. They will use those OSes for the foreseeable future, but eventually that will change. I picture Genius TVs more like giant tablets with personalities. The current iPad has more screen resolution than a HD TV. Imagine if your TV had a library of apps like you find at the Apple or Android app store and could talk to your as easy as you talk to your friends?
Isn’t it time we have a world standard operating system? So any screen size can run the same apps? Once the screens become Geniuses, it won’t matter what OS they run, they will be smarter than us anyway.
If all our data is in the cloud, would we even need a SSD drives? Wouldn’t 16-32gb of local memory for each screen handle it all? After the optical drive disappears won’t hard drives disappear next?
Can you imagine the opening menu on this Genius TV?
TV
Movies
News
Magazines
Music
Audiobooks
Internet
Apps
Videophone
Games
Photographs
Videos
Documents
Security
Medical
Or would we even need a menu if it was completely voice activated? Most people can’t imagine the possibilities. I’m sure I’m just barely scratching the surface of what’s possible. Could you have have imagined the iPhone back in the 1990s? Look at the video on this page about Pebble watches. It’s a Bluetooth watch the integrates with your smartphone. This synergy between two devices, watch and smartphone, creates surprising spinoffs. Combing TVs, computers, internet, cable TV, phones, AI, etc. will produce some surprising spinoffs we can’t foresee now.
One thing that’s sweeping the country right now is online education. At first in colleges but also for K-12 schooling too. If you seen TED talks and Khan academy videos, imagine what a Genius TV could do for education. Combine it with Skype and Google Hangout and home schooling becomes more social. But instead of studying with children from the same school, or district, it would be possible to find other students anywhere in the world to form a study group.
If you have a 14-year-old kid who is fascinated by chemistry, you can hook them up with other 14 year-olds also fascinated by chemistry, and have them watch lectures from the very best chemistry professors in the world, and then have them remote view chemistry laboratories that are doing real chemistry. Suddenly a TV becomes a lot more than a TV. And computers become more than computers.
What happens if politics becomes truly participatory? Why let just 100 senators vote on a bill, when anyone who is interested could participate? TV has always been passive. The Internet and computers are active. Combining live events with the internet and TV screens should produce endless forms of real-time two-way/multi-way social networking.
What happens when your computers, TV, utility meter, security system and medical monitors mind meld into one system? Is it a computer? Is it a TV. Do we need a new name? Let’s not pick HAL 9000. We’ll interact with large wall sized screens, so we’ll think we’re talking to a TV, but one that’s very smart. Not some box that just passes on hundreds of video feeds. As we add more intelligence to these devices won’t they seem more intelligent and individual?
Read Wake by Robert Sawyer. No, I mean it. You need to be prepared for the future. There are science fiction stories that can help you imagine this future better than I can. Read Rudy Rucker’s The Ware Tetralogy. People are all nuts over vampires, zombies and werewolves right now. Those undead creatures aren’t real and won’t happen. Intelligent machines are happening. Pay attention. We’re all gadget crazy, but what happens when our TVs do become geniuses?
Millions of people have dropped cable and satellite TV in the last few years. Some have done it to save money during a recession, and others because they are tired of ever increasing cable bills, or being forced to buy TV channels the don’t watch. Recent news reports say the average American is paying $100 a month for TV, that it will be $123 by 2015, and $200 a month by 2020.
Even the people who continue to subscribe to cable and satellite services complain about too many channels, bad service and growing bills. When will the pay TV industry wake up and think, “Hey, the customer is always right!” A friend of mine got mad when his cable company charged him $50 to fix his cable service he was paying over $100 a month to use – shouldn’t something you buy be in working order? He wasn’t ready to quit cable completely, so he took his service down to the $29.95 basic rate. He’s still mad and thinks of giving up cable completely.
I gave up cable because I got tired of paying for a zillion channels I didn’t watch. I wanted a la carte pricing but cable companies want to bundle their services. If you want to know why, look at this chart I got from “Hate Paying for Cable? Here’s Why.” You’ll probably need to click on the image to see the larger version to read it. This is an example of what cable/satellite companies pay for each network to get all those channels they offer.
I don’t watch sports, so I would be paying over seven dollars a month for sports channels I don’t watch. WTF!!! I recently tried to get U-verse to sell me just Turner Classic Movies (TCM) which this chart says this cabled company pays 26 cents a month per subscriber, but I’d have to pay AT&T $80 a month to watch the one channel I wanted. Sure I’d get 200 other channels, but I only wanted TCM.
By the way, that chart is old. A newer article says ESPN is $4.69 and TNT $1.16 (“How ESPN Is Making Your Monthly Cable Bill More and More Expensive”). This is like going to Target to buy toilet paper and being forced to buy a pair of pants, a quart of motor oil, a bottle of shampoo, a comb, a gallon of Clorox, and 200 other items just to be able to leave the store with butt wipes.
But you can see why cable networks want cable companies to bundle their stations. Take ESPN. For each million homes forced to buy ESPN, they contribute $4.69 million per month to ESPN. However, if we went to a la carte pricing and only 500,000 per million wanted ESPN, and ESPN wanted to make the same amount of money, then they would have to charge $8.38 a month to the people who wanted it. Which would probably make many of those 500,000 subscribers think even more about if they really wanted ESPN.
If we have a la carte pricing, I doubt Comcast or U-verse would sell me TCM for 26 cents. But I’d be willing to pay $10 a month for TCM, but I’m not sure how many other TCM fans would be willing to pay that much. But for a la carte to work, instead of shaking everyone down for 26 cents a month, TCM fans would have to pony up more, maybe a lot more, or TCM would go out of business.
If we had a la carte pricing, many cable stations would go out of business. Bundled pricing is keeping these channels afloat. If the goal is to have hundreds of television networks, bundling is the way to go. But most cable customers bitterly complain about buying channels they do not want, and it’s the reason why cable bills keep growing and growing.
Cable and satellite companies need to get right by their customers. What they need to do is provide a base service, say $19.95 that provides a HD DVR/modem box and the local stations. HD is standard with free over the air stations, so quit being a dick and charging extra – and it will simplify things for both the customers and you.
DVRs should be standard too. Quit finding ways to charge extra for what should be standard, that only annoys the customer. And don’t charge for fixing the system when it’s broke. We’re renting a service from you, it should be reliable and high quality. Even at $19.95 a month for the base system with just local channels, pay TV services should be able to make a profit at this level.
Then offer an onscreen menu that customer’s can control from home that shows all the channels, pay-per-view, on-demand channels and other services with the monthly costs for each. Let them sign up with their clickers – no annoying phone calls. I bet you can make the same profits or more by pricing the channels individually. The only downside will be that the total channels will go from 200-300 to maybe 50-100.
Since I gave up cable TV I learned just how good 1 channel can be. I have a home built DVR (HTPC) and what I mainly record is PBS. It offers more top quality TV than I can watch. If you distilled hundreds of channels, with mostly crappy content, into dozens of channels with mostly quality content, the perception of your product will vastly improve.
I think most homes will be happy with 10-20 “a la carte pay” channels. Having fewer channels makes watching TV less stressful. To much choice can be painful. Their cable bill could be as high or higher than it is now, but it would reflect exactly what they wanted.
If such a system was available I’d go back to being a cable subscriber.
In the future there are other changes cable companies could make to make their customers happier. Get rid of the cable box. That would reduce clutter and a clicker. Work with TV manufacturers to make smart TVs work with cable/satellite feeds and develop standards. DVRs should be built into TVs. A SSD drive would not take up much space. It could be user replaceable. Or make TVs with 128-256gb SSDs built-in, with a slot for customer’s to add an additional drive.
A TV could be built to do TV, Internet, video games and music that uses one clicker plus game controllers. One cable, from a cable/satellite/broadband company could provide all content. And build your systems with self-diagnostic awareness so we won’t have the aggravation of feuding with your company over intermittent problems. There should be no reason to send a cable guy to see what’s wrong. Your system should know what’s wrong, and if it’s involves something in the house, notify us to pick a time for your guy to come by – otherwise fix the outside stuff without bothering us.
And why fight Netflix – make it part of your lineup. Right now I have over-the-air stations I use the TV clicker to manage, and then HTPC content, which I use a wireless keyboard, and then Amazon and Netflix through a Roku box with another clicker, and watch Blu-Ray/DVDs with another box and clicker. Plus I manage sound with a receiver and another clicker. That’s a HUGE PAIN IN THE ASS! The next TV I buy should have all that crap built-in, requiring only one clicker.
If Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and other Internet TV services can work with TV manufacturers to get their content built right into the TV, why can’t cable/satellite/broadband companies? Sorry Roku, but it’s obvious that your 2 ounces of electronics could easily be added to a TV set. And why not a computer and stereo receiver? If such integration happens, and TVs are moving that way now, having an external cable box is just stupid. I’m not an inventor but I can see which way the electronic wind is blowing.
Lastly, Hey TCM, go the Netflix/Hulu Plus route and set up your own Internet TV service. I’d gladly pay you $9.99 a month, but you might get more subscribers at $4.99 or $7.99.
Auxiliary Memory 