The answer is always incredibly simple. For instance, you can just get Netflix, and watch all those episodes of Entourage on DVD – six months or so after they air. You can go to Hulu and watch programs – except for the fact that the overwhelming majority of cable programs are either a) not on Hulu or b) on Hulu months after they air.

Now there is a point to be made here about why they call it pop “culture” and how there is a societal value to watching shows near the air date so you can engage in the social aspects of entertainment. But I’ll leave that point alone.

The really annoying part of these posts is the authors will invariably talk about the ease of getting cable content, then cite as their examples shows which are not cable programs.

The latest of these is TechCrunch. Now, I’m a geek, so I read TechCrunch a lot. Some of their content I’ll quibble with, but most of it is pretty good. This little item, though, is truly stupid.

John Biggs posits that he has come up with a great process for ditching cable:

I’ve been angling to get rid of my TiVo and cable for some time now and I believe I’ve finally figured out a solution that works best for me. It involves a lots scripting, Sabnzbd, and HandbrakeCLI and I’ll tell you what I ultimately did next week once it’s stable but it seems to be working as well as can be expected for these sorts of hacks.

Sure, John, that’s super easy as long as you’re familiar with Usenet, binary newsreaders, and video transcoders. Super easy!

He goes on to explain that the content he’s pulling in is completely illegal:

It consists of two disparate parts. The first is a shady underground that can offer these shows, stripped of commercials, a few minutes after they’ve aired. How they do it is a topic for another story, but needless to say popular shows are available in less than ten minutes after they air on the Eastern Seaboard. It is a testament to the dedication of a few TV lovers that these shows are available, for free, as they happen.

It’s important to understand that unlike mp3s, television content is not easily ripped and not easily portable. Yes, the shady underground may currently be doing this, but the content owners are chasing it down.

But let’s assume all of this is easy, and the illegality won’t make you squirm, and let’s look at the shows John’s actually talking about here.

What I don’t see in that list is actual, cable content. There is a bunch of stuff from the UK, and a whole lot of broadcast content, but where is the cable content? If it’s that easy to ditch cable (and cable companies should be “skeered”) and given there are literally hundreds of cable channels, and only a few broadcast channels, why is a list of available illegal content skewed so heavily to broadcast.

So from the read of this, John Bigg’s has gone out of his way to come up with a way to steal broadcast content through an incredibly complex process that involves “a shady underground”.

So here’s my suggestion for John. If you want to watch TV as it airs (rather than “immediately after”) then go buy yourself an antenna. They’re lovely inventions that let you watch all the broadcast TV you want, and don’t involve scripting, HandBrake, or SABnzbd. If you want an option to timeshift that programming, invest in a Win-TV-HVR-950Q from Hauppage. It has a built in DVR, and picks up NTSC, ATSC, and clear QAM programming (broadcast, in other words). It’s plug and play, so again, no scripting.

The RNC’s Health Care Bill of Rights for Seniors

Specifically distressing is the second point:

PROTECT MEDICARE AND NOT CUT IT IN THE NAME OF HEALTH CARE REFORM: President Obama and Congressional Democrats are promoting a government-run health care experiment that will cut over $500 billion from Medicare to be used to pay for their plan. Medicare should not be raided to pay for another entitlement.

Since when are we about “protecting” medicare? It’s a bloated program full of fraud and abuse. If we guarantee it won’t be “raided to pay for another entitlement”, we’re essentially demanding that government create two conflicting and somewhat duplicative health programs – both of which will likely be full of fraud and abuse.

To a cynic’s eye, this ‘proposal’ is the “let’s rile and confuse seniors so they’ll get even more flummoxed” plan. It’s disgusting to me that the party of small government is pushing a plan that would guarantee bureaucratic longevity simply to curry favor with seniors.

I’ve got a better idea for a plan. Why don’t we make the government fix Medicare and Medicaid – thus demonstrating they have a clue – before we let them create yet another program. If they can’t be fixed, then let’s figure out how to dismantle them.

In response, I got the standard pushback that the costs for such things are reasonable because of the security details that travel with elected officials. I was specifically asked if CEOs travel with security.

I had similar discussions in the spring when the issue was $12 billion for new helicopters in the Marine One fleet. The President, to his credit, was at least smart enough to say, “I’ll make do with the old ones.” Congress has had no such thought. Instead, the Congressional plan to buy eight planes actually DOUBLES the costs and number of aircraft the Department of Defense had requested.

This strikes me as odd on three levels.

First, there is a size issue. The request included four 737s. These are not small planes. So we have to ask exactly how big these security details are. Do we really need planes that big to ferry them?

Second, I am guessing that many CEOs do travel with security, but I am guessing that most do not. As a stockholder, I’m of two minds on that. I would like to think that the CEO of a company I have invested in is protected from threats of kidnapping or assassination. I may count on that company to provide income in the form of dividends or retirement planning. It would be nice if that were safeguarded.

On the other hand, however, I appreciate that most CEOs understand that they are expendable. If something happened to them, there are a lot of people who could be brought in to fill that role.

This brings me to the last point. Most Members of Congress don’t share that understanding of their relative importance. And we as a people seem to condone their inflated sense of their place in the world. We make excuses for their excess because “they have to be protected”. Yet we must ask ourselves whether that’s really true.

Their jobs, by nature, are such that they can be replaced on a whim by us in regular intervals. A Representative, specifically, serves only two years at a time and can be fired by the public every 750 days. Yet they believe (and we allow them to believe) that they are critical to the function of our government. That they even have security details is absurd. You can argue that only certain Members in leadership have such protection, but their term of service is still at our pleasure. We, and the Constitution clearly feel we could do without them.

We coddle our elected officials. More specifically, we allow them to coddle themselves. Then we make excuses for their behavior because its easier than looking in the mirror and asking ourselves why we don’t throw them out when they get out of control.

We’re left with Congress deciding, contrary to the wishes of the Department of Defense, how many planes are appropriate and how much private access to aircraft they need.

Perhaps we need to rethink things and send a clear message by throwing out every Member who votes for these planes. They clearly believe they mean more to us than we think they do.

If we took away some of their perks, forced them to live like the common citizens they’re supposed to be, and specifically did away with security details designed to protect them from us, maybe they’d behave less like protected overlords and more like our representatives.

At issue is a column by the Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro about the recently announced TV Everywhere plan cable companies are pursuing. In his column Rob writes:

Yes, you read that right: To watch this new batch of TV shows online, you’d have to sign up for a traditional pay-TV plan.

The TV Everywhere idea has been a dream of some media people for the last few years; see, for instance, Mark Cuban’s defense of the idea. But I don’t get it. At all.

Well, my immediate thought is, “You’re right. You don’t get it.” But after that, words fail me.

First, Rob, this isn’t “a new batch of TV shows”. This is the content you’re already paying for, but you’re now allowed to view it online. In order to view Pay-TV online, you need to pay for Pay-TV. That’s sort of the whole point.

Pegoraro suggests that this is like requiring people to pay for a subscription to the Washington Post in order to take a college prep test course. Ummm… No. That’s not at all the same thing. TV everywhere is, however, the equivalent of saying, “If you want to eat your McDonald’s Happy Meal in the park, you still have to pay for the McDonald’s happy meal.”

Next, Pegoraro asserts that incredibly complicated things like “authentication” are way to difficult to comprehend or apply:

Set aside such operational issues as authentication (how do you verify that one person’s a Comcast/DirecTV/Fios/etc. customer and another is not?)…

Ummm… How do you know if someone is a Gmail user or not? Well, Rob, they’re called “accounts”. When you subscribe, they create one. They come with something called an “account number” or a “user name” and a “password”. When you want to access your service online, you type (that big flat thing in front of your monitor is called a keyboard) those pieces of information into a form, click “submit” and voila! You are authenticated.

Pegoraro, again:

If somebody wants to watch video online, let ‘em: Charge them a fee, make money off their attention through advertising–better yet, give people a choice between watching ads or paying for an ad-free experience. But don’t force them to sign up for an unrelated, non-Internet service.

Sure, because the “ad-supported” model is working so well for broadcasters and newspapers. Even YouTube (ad supported video) is projected to lose between $175 million and $470 million this year. Even TV advertising is a failing venture because people are skipping the commercials. Hollywood has begun writing the commercials directly into the script to stave off that practice. NBC recently announced that Jay Leno’s show in the fall will be “DVR-proof” to force advertising on the public.

Do such actions seem like the tactics of a business model that works?

So let’s take a business model that works (a hybrid ad/subscriber model) and force it to pursue a failing business model because you want content for free – content that may cost millions per episode to produce.

As for the comment that you are forcing someone “to sign up for an unrelated, non-Internet service”, that’s still ridiculous no matter how many times you repeat it. This isn’t a non-Internet service. It’s the same service you already subscribe to, you just have more ways to consume it now. However, if you want to consume it, you have to subscribe.

Finally, Pegoraro suggests that media companies should simply give up and make all their media available for free:

Repeat after me: Trying to introduce an artificial scarcity of easily-duplicated content on the Internet does not work. If you set up boundaries that make no sense to your customers, you will simply cede the field to bootleg redistribution of your work. Fighting this principle is like trying to push water uphill–with a broom.

Well, actually, Rob. Most cable content isn’t available online for free – even through bootleg. Some of the most popular shows on cable are HGTV’s design programs. I challenege you to go find a readily available bootleg source of them. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

…

…

Back yet? What about ESPN sporting events? They’re all available for free elsewhere, right? No? What about NFL games? Surely the satellite guys give those away for free and you don’t need to subscribe to get the Sunday ticket, right? No? Hmmm… Well what about HBO’s programming. You can get Entourage episodes for free all over the net, right? Really? Only the old ones that have been released for sale well after the air date?

How can that be? How can people control such things? How can they possibly defeat the bootleg distribution of their work? Because they don’t make them available online for free? Perhaps.

The fact is, despite Rob’s characterization of Pay-TV as “easily-duplicated content”, it’s simply not true. Look at YouTube. The most popular video sharing site will disable the soundtrack to your video if the audio patterns in the file match copyrighted content. Sure. You could cruise BitTorrents looking for content. And many do. Those sites are constantly defending against their copyright violations and go out of business regardless of the legitimacy they claim (AllOfMP3.com, anyone?).

You can also find websites that show grainy, handicam captured versions of first-run films – often before they appear in theaters. But the quality sucks. Under Pegoraro’s theory, movie theaters should simply give up the fight and make all movies (regardless of the cost to produce and market them) open to the public at no cost on day one. Better yet, just close all the theaters and let people download the movies for free? Heck, the studio could easily make up those $30 million salaries and production budgets by displaying an ad for mortgage caluclators right along side the film, right?

Mistake number two (and ultimately a bigger mistake than actually signing up) came in the form of clicking the “See who you know on Naymz” link.

Under normal circumstances, the “who do you know” phase of social netowrk sign up goes something like this:

1. I select the form of my address book (Gmail, Yahoo, etc) and it searches my contacts.
2. It shows me a list of the contacts who are currently members and asks me if I would like to become “friends” or whatever the nomenclature they use may be
3. It then shows me a lit of all the unmatched addresses and asks if I would like to mail them an invite (to which I universally say no)
4. If I say yes, it e-mails my friends an invite (ONCE!)

This is where Naymz does things a little differently.

Naymz will let you connect to other social networks to find connections. I chose LinkedIn. It scanned my contacts and presented a list, just like the others do.

Naymz, however, actually combines step two and step three above. It presents the list, and lets you send your messages. Since I have signed up for dozens of these networks to test them out, and I have never seen anyone stray too far from the steps I outlined, I clicked ok. I failed to notice that Naymz includes a small icon and disclaimer that says only those people identified with the icon are users (very few of the people I know are – even now). It also says you should remove anyone you don’t want to mail. The icon and disclaimer are small enough that I missed it completely the first time through and only found it after I became aware of my original mistake.

Now, I had expected to see a list of unmatched addresses after clicking that button. What I saw instaed was an immediate inflow of e-mail that had subject lines like, “What the hell is Naymz?”

I spent the better part of a day apologizing to people for the Naymz spam and told them they should not take that as an endorsement of Naymz. I told everyone that I was simply testing it out to see what I thought.

Since that fateful day, I have recieved many more messages asking the same question. Until today, I had always assumed that was because they had just opened the original message.

However, upon actually logging in to Naymz today (I was looking for a way to turn off or limit their WAY too frequent messages to me), I discovered Naymz has been e-mailing constant reminders (a la Plaxo) to those who had not replied. It hadn’t simply used my name to spam them once, it was following up with mupltiple requests.

So now my Naymz account is cancelled. If you received a request from me to sign up, I apologize profusely. If you said yes to that request, doubly so. If you didn’t say yes, and have been bombarded by further appeals since, even more so.

I had told some people that I would let them know my thoughts when I got done with my evaluation. So here it is:

I would avoid Naymz like it’s the plague. It combines all the annoying characteristics of Plaxo with the disregard for informed consent typically reserved for malware.

I have deleted my account. That is a rare step for a guy who has littered the Internet with unused SocNet accounts. But I am not stopping there.

I hereby hope and pray that the good people at Naymz suffer the karmic ass kicking which they have rightly earned. They’ll go down with Plaxo and Gator as yet another Internet scourge.

I have, for several months now, seen a string of posts and tweets from these same lefty friends that are either mocking or dismissive of the Conservatives nascent efforts on Twitter. Here’s one example courtesy of TechPresident’s own Micah Sifry.

It’s positively quaint to listen to Republicans murmur optimistically about their “dominance” on Twitter. #polc09, #tcot, #p2

The very first time I saw one, it reminded me immediately of comments I had seen and heard before. They were the openly dismissive comments directed by complacent and cocky Republicans at the Democrats efforts online.

I specifically remember more than a few people, myself included, who watched the rise of the online left with initial derision. As late as 2004 and 2005, I heard things like, “The Democrats and their blogs. How’s that working out for them? All that effort and how many wins has it resulted in?”

Beginning with Conrad Burns and George Allen, we began to quickly see the results of “those blogs”. It’s a lesson we failed to heed early on, and it contributed greatly to our demise.

What we failed to recognize was the infancy of an effort to use new technology to mobilize. It was an effort to build a new network and the infrastructure to disseminate a coherent message.

I have argued that the reason the Democrats never mastered talk radio was very simple – they never had to. In modern politics, the insurgent party will adapt to the most interactive (and the most real-time) technology available at the time. In 1992, having lost the White House, House and Senate, the GOP gravitated toward talk radio. Despite it being a broadcast medium, it was the most interactive medium available. It was adapted to facilitate the conversation about the direction of the party and the country.

The Democrats, rising out of the loss in 2000, had to coallesce around a platform. Talk radio, had the Internet not been available, would likely have become the staging area and the rise of the left on talk radio would have been a near certainty. But a funny thing happened on the march toward the AM dial.

With the Internet, blogs and Meetup became the new polis for the exiled Democrats.

Now you could argue that two data points is hardly enough to qualify my central thesis – the adaption of interactive forums by the out party. But keep in mind that Americans detachment from one another and from in-person communities really didn’t explode until about this same time. Prior to that, most people who were politically active simply turned to their party and its structures. It’s just the last 20 years that have split us from our parties and each other, so we can only look at the data available.

That brings us back to the present day and the Republicans.

Now that we are the out party, we are turning to the Internet to discuss, debate and strategize the party’s future. It is no longer, however, simple enough to label “The Internet” as a monolithic thing the way we did with the Democratic use of the medium. The Internet is no longer about websites as it was with blogs and Meetup. The Internet, as it exists today, is more a generic platform for advanced communication services – whether they are site based, text messages, cellular applications, or anything else.

In the world of converging technologies, Twitter represents the single most interactive, most real-time, tool available. Twitter is mobile. Twitter is rapid. Twitter facilitates deep content (via linking) and fast action (via retweets and viral distribution).

For the Democrats that dismiss Republican testing of many and various models of activism on Twitter, you should watch very closely what’s going on, rather than simply mocking it. Complacency and satisfaction with your status quo is a slippery slope and it’s very easy to fall into the “yes, but what has it gotten them” mindset.

It is likely, I would even say certain, that Twitter, or some next generation concept that builds upon Twitter’s framework, will be a central component of the GOP resurgence. It most certainly won’t happen overnight. However, I guarantee you will – when you find yourself out of power again – be able to trace the roots of your downfall to this earliest of efforts.

Until then, to my friends on the left, let me say two things. First, we’ll keep using Twitter, and you can keep cracking jokes. Second, as long as you do, we’ll see you on the other side, soon enough.

Update: Based on further conversation (via Twitter) about this post, I need to clarify a point. I’m not claiming the GOP is currently “dominant” on Twitter. That was Micah’s reference. I’m simply looking at the tendency for conservatives to adapt to Twitter faster and easier than they have other online venues.

The left’s attitude (represented by Micah’s comment) seems to me to be that the GOP is putting all its eggs in the Twitter basket without doing all the other things that the left did to be successful. My argument is that’s a false assumption. It requires that the GOP mimic the left to advance online. Just as the left bypassed the right’s use of talk radio and went straight on to a different model, I think the right may be able to skip directly past the duplication of the left’s infrastructure by simply making use of what are currently the most advanced communications and mobilization tools. I see evidence that many in the right are developing new models in an effort to do just that.

Those new models have not yet become “dominant”. My central premise is, however, is that many on the left and right seem to believe we must embrace the left’s status quo. I, on the other hand, believe our salvation will not come in duplicating their model, but in creating a new paradigm for our own activism.

The old and new rail system

The old joke is that trains give you all the discomfort of airline travel, but in six times the time. The rail plan calls for trains to travel 100 miles per hour, so the joke should be revised to four times.

The fact is, trains are a great idea in a country the size of Japan, France or Britain, that you can backpack across in a day. They suck, just a little bit, for travel across a country 3000 miles wide. Why take a high-speed train that gets you from LA to NY in two days when you can fly and be there in 5 hours?

High-speed trains would be a better idea for high traffic commuter corridors. As an example, look closely at the map and you’ll notice you still can’t travel North. There is no connector between Oklahoma and Kansas City, or anywhere in Georgia up through Kentucky, Tennessee and into Indiana.

You can’t get from Albuquerque to Denver, Denver to Phoenix, Phoenix or Albuquerque to Salt Lake City, or any of those cities to anywhere in Texas.

If you are a salesman in the southwest, you can get to Chicago faster than you could run there, that’s true. Chances are most of your travel will still be by air, and flying short distances within your region, though.

It looks to me like someone went to Amtrak and said, “If you could go to all the same places using the same shitty routes, but do it marginally faster, what would that look like?”

Congrats, guys. You batted their answer out of the park.

In the interview, he also ruled out raising the gas tax, the primary source of transportation funding…

Revenue from gas taxes is becoming problematic as cash-strapped Americans drive less and buy more fuel-efficient cars, leaving the government with a growing hole in funds to pay for the nation’s aging highway system.

Until recently, the 18.4-cent-a-gallon federal gas tax had been a steady and growing pot of revenue. Over the past half-century, it has paid for the interstate highway system, which has crisscrossed the nation with asphalt, and since 1982, it has been kicking in for transit needs…

The current system also assumes that Americans will drive more every year. And for many years that was true, with miles traveled increasing about 3 percent a year, Basso said. But when gasoline prices hit $4 a gallon last year, people began driving less. According to AAA, Americans drove 107.9 billion fewer miles in 2008 than in 2007.

Apparently, that combined with advances in fuel efficiency have led to declining revenue for transportation projects – an unintended consequence of greening our automobiles.

In what may be the shortest flight ever of a trial balloon, the government immediately shot down the idea of the mileage tax. However, there have already been pilot projects to test the idea.

As an Oregon DOT spokesman said, “[G]as-powered vehicles are going away. When that point comes, how do you collect money for your transportation system if your revenues are based on gasoline?”

Only in the final two paragraphs do they even raise the privacy concerns about this – namely the government tracking the movement of its citizens.

I suspect that the police – now aware of the lengthy record of your travels – would demand access to the data to track the movement of suspects (or “people of interest” or… well, you get it.

It is frightening to think of the implications. But it is interesting to see that while the previous administration wanted to violate our freedom for the purpose of homeland security, this one may do it just for the tax revenue.

I, like others still tuned in week after week, are searching disparately for something to make sense of the show, and I have finally found a theory (or possibly a pair of complementary theories) that make sense of the show.

Oddly, the theory starts with my former barometer of cool – whether you have read Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (which despite the term trilogy now runs to five novels now with a sixth reportedly due later this year.)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide featured a spaceship called the Heart of Gold. The Heart of Gold operated on the Infinite Improbability Drive. The second book in the series, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, describes it this way:

The Heart of Gold’s Improbability Drive made it the most powerful and unpredictable ship in existence. There was nothing it couldn’t do, provided you knew exactly how improbable it was that the thing you wanted it to do would ever happen.

When the improbability drive is operating, the spaceship passes through space based on the odds against something happening. As two of the books characters are drifting unprotected through open space, at the last moment before they die, the spaceship Heart of Gold picks them up. The odds against them being saved and the improbability field around the ship pass the same point of improbability and the two are rescued.

So what does this have to do with Lost? Well, the idea of the island as some sort of improbability field occurred to me as I was reading Doc Jensen’s theory of Lost and zero point energy.

There’s a whole bunch of Men of Faith ‚Äî fringe thinkers, mostly ‚Äî who believe that zero point energy is like magic. It can be mentally directed to make stuff happen (a.k.a. mind over matter), or even grant a kind of omniscience that could allow a person to experience past, present, and future all at once…

Remember the scene in this season’s second episode in which Neil (a.k.a. Frogurt) died? Now, I am convinced that this scene is actually a coded message pointing toward zero point theory. The scene begins with Miles Straume hauling in a dead boar. Then, Neil starts yelling at Sawyer for calling him Frogurt, emphatically reminding us that his name is Neil. Now, earlier in the episode, Neil carried on about the utter pointlessness of their survival struggle. Why work so hard to build a new camp or start a fire if the time flashes will basically take it all away? His cynical consternation reaches a crescendo in his death scene, when Neil rants about their inability to produce simple, conventional energy (”We have no fire!”) before getting killed by a flaming arrow of irony.

I actually saw that differently. I don’t see that as a flaming arrow of irony, I see it as a flaming arrow of improbability. As Neil is ranting about the absence of fire, the combination of zero point energy and improbability come together to provide fire, but not in the way Neil would like.

For other examples, you don’t need to look very far. In last week’s episode, Locke and the crew arrive at the Orchid station. Juliette says, ‘What are the odds this thing would be here at this time?’ A time shift immediately erases the station.

In season one, Walt is reading a comic book featuring attacking polar bears, and the crew walking to the radio tower the next day is attacked by a rampaging polar bear.

How about the odds the heroine addicted Charlie would stumble upon a heroine laden plane?

And don’t even get me started on the long odds against winning the lottery and Hurley’s connection to the numbers.

Could zero point energy and improbability create a field where whatever you thought, no matter how improbable, could blink into existence?

The theory isn’t without precedence in science fiction.

In his 1936 story Evolution, John Campbell described the Probability Time Wave:

“Their PTW tube caught and displayed every possibility that was ever to exist. And somewhere in that vast sweep of probability, every possible thing existed. Somewhere, the wildest dream of the wildest optimist was, and became fact.”

So what if the island is essentially a focal point for energy and improbability? It would certainly explain a lot of the oddities surrounding the island.

Jack’s unresolved feelings for dad? Bing! Christian Shepherd starts walking around the island. Michael wants to get his boy off the island? Done! He just needs to screw his friends first. The island is providing everything people want, but doing it with strings. You want fire? Ok! But it’s going to kill you.

Now this theory may cover the “funtional” aspects of the island, but it does not even begin to address questions about the storyline of Lost. However, I expect improbability to play an important part in the answer.