"Wes Stewart" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 15 Dec 2005 09:02:17 +0000, Paul Johnson
wrote:
And after a natural disaster cable TV systems will be working about as
well as cell phones have.

Only as long as the emergency broadcast system is kept alive. There's no
particular reason the funding for it couldn't be shut off/expanded to include
cable/switch only to cable/whatever. In fact, one could argue that during a
natural disaster cable TV could actually be more reliable in that its
infrastructure is somewhat more protected than a huge antenna ever could be.
(I seem to recall from Hurricane Katrina that some of the first phone calls
getting out -- barring folks with satellite phones -- were VOIP calls over
wired Internet connections.)

4:3 aspect was a technical limitation that really should have died long
before my birth, much less now. Good riddance.

What "technical limitation"? Aspect ratios are arbitrary.

Not true. In the 'early days' of TV, the glass for CRTs couldn't be blown
into such arbitrary aspect ratios; hence 4:3 was chosen as a reasonably
compromise between producibility and "well, at least it's not square...!" :-)
Presumably 16:9 is a closer match to human vision than 4:3, and for viewing a
movie it would seem to make sense to try to match that since you're trying to
encompass the viewer.

---Joel