"J Kelly" wrote in message
...
People
will wake up and have no more TV.

Only if they haven't actuallyed been watching that TV for the past few years.
:-) As 2009 approaches you can better there's going to be plenty of coverage
of the impending death of NTSC transmissions...

Our government hard at rest, but
hey, they are here to help!

It's not a black and white issue (ha, ha)... the FCC is supposed to be using
the spectrum for 'the public good,' and deciding whether or not 'the public'
benefits or not from killing NTSC in favor of HDTV is far from strictly being
a technical decision. The FCC, almost by definition, can never make a
decision that's going to please all 280 million people in the country. (A
prime example is the significant number of people who don't support the
current regulations on profanity, nudity, etc. on the 'public' TV and radio
frequencies... many of them seem to be the kinds of people who'd just as soon
abolish the FCC all together, even though I suspect they'd be the first people
to start complaining when anarchy took over and whoever owned the strongest
transmitter in a local area controlled the airwaves...)

On the other hand, the FCC does seem to have a much heavier concentration of
lawyers and would-be politicians running it today than in years past when
there were more engineers around, so their motivations may have changed over
the years...

---Joel Kolstad