Oboma .. another term

[NateS]

Another great right-wing oversimplification. To those of us with a hearing deficit, a minority of the population but one with equal ownership of the public airways, grossly inadequate regulation of the TV industry during the Bush years resulted in our losing our previously established closed captioning on broadcast TV, because the industry slipped through the loophole that the prior requirement of CC supposedly didn't apply after the switchover to digital transmission. The technology was already common knowledge and it would have cost only a few cents for the industry to have included CC capability in digital sets, but the industry shrugged that, since the federal regulations had not been extended to digital, why should they include it! For several years, we lost a previous capability we had and relied on, while the industry delayed the extension of the CC requirement to digital as long as they could. Only now are we getting back what they took away, and it took new regulations to get them to do it!

Nate

I'm sorry Nate, I did numerous searches to find what you were talking about, and found "none"! Maybe I'm not understanding what you are trying to say. When, the conversion was made, I owned both digital and analog tv sets. I didn't get the conversion box for my analog tv's, so I cant say. Now, on my digital tv, anytime I hit the mute button, it automatically starts CC at the bottom of the screen. I never saw a break in CC after the conversion, on my digital set! Maybe you could point me to a few websites to explain the problem that you were having?

Oh, I added the clip below to show you who enacted the law to require companies to start manufacturing tv's with the chips in them to decode CC. The article was even written by a "Left Winger"! I'll have to give him credit though, at least he acknowledged that it was a Republican that enacted the law!

Well, closed-captioning itself is far more widespread. George Bush – a Republican president, no less – enacted a law requiring that caption-decoder chips be built into nearly all U.S. televisions after mid-1993. No more than 300,000 set-top decoders had ever been sold in the entire prehistory of closed captioning; suddenly more than 20 million decoder-equipped TV sets were added each year, making captioning a fixture in hearing people’s lives, too.

*http://joeclark.org/design/print/readingthetube.html

As far as analog tv's during the switch, they required a converter box to allow it to receive the digital signal. The CC decoder was built inside these converter boxes! There were rebates offered on these conversion boxes that would make them either free or of little cost to anyone who had analog tv's!

- You are concerned how the switch will affect closed captioning.

FCC rules require that all digital-to-analog converter boxes pass
through closed captioning automatically. In addition, many
converter boxes will generate captions through the converter box
itself, thus enabling you to change the way your captions look. If
you have a digital TV, you’ll enjoy better visibility and ease of use.

http://www.wsiu.org/media/TV/dtv/WSIU_DTV_Switch.pdf

Woodworker, I could be wrong but I would bet that you were until recently getting your closed captioning through your set-top box, probably a cable company box, and not through your TV. All well and good, except one of the main rewards to the public of switching from analog to digital TV transmission was that it eliminated the need for cable TV services in most metropolitan areas, giving you a crystal-clear TV picture with a small $50 UHF antenna.

Like many of the folks in our neighborhood, we dumped the cable TV box soon after digital OTA TV, and get all the TV we can consume over-the-air or through the hundreds of channels on our $80 Roku box. To get the advanced picture, we use HDMI on our HDTV. With analog TV, CC was built into the TV set. With digital, it was only being built into the set-top box from the cable company, and not into the TV, thus leaving you at the mercy of the cable TV operators, even in metropolitan areas where the digital OTA signals are strong enough and diverse enough to give you loads of options without paying a cable company. HDMI would not pass CC.

That's the explanation we were given.

I will be happy to be corrected on this, but at the time we lost CC after getting an HDTV, I went to numerous websites for the hearing impaired, and all forum members reported being in the same boat, and being stuck there, until after the last, recent stages of the implementation of the law known as the "Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010."

Regards,

Nate

[NateS]

Another great right-wing oversimplification.

BTW, would you consider me "right-wing" if you knew that I support personal freedom, non-interventionist foreign policy, tolerance of others' personal choices, civil liberties and individual privacy, separation of church and state, ending all corporate welfare, same-sex marriage, legalization and regulation of prostitution, and legalization and regulation of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and morphine?

Sleep2Die4, I can understand your being offended at thinking I was calling you "right-wing" but I was referring to your comment and not necessarily to your overall beliefs and character. I referred to your comment as "Another great right-wing oversimplification."

Obviously, many of your other beliefs quoted above are clearly not right-wing.

Regards,

Nate

[lazer]

[Pachyderm's Nose]

[NateS]

I suppose it's a matter of who is looking at this map. It looks mighty fine to me!

And this one look fine to me:

[NateS]

Woodworker, I could be wrong but I would bet that you were until recently getting your closed captioning through your set-top box, probably a cable company box, and not through your TV. All well and good, except one of the main rewards to the public of switching from analog to digital TV transmission was that it eliminated the need for cable TV services in most metropolitan areas, giving you a crystal-clear TV picture with a small $50 UHF antenna.

Like many of the folks in our neighborhood, we dumped the cable TV box soon after digital OTA TV, and get all the TV we can consume over-the-air or through the hundreds of channels on our $80 Roku box. To get the advanced picture, we use HDMI on our HDTV. With analog TV, CC was built into the TV set. With digital, it was only being built into the set-top box from the cable company, and not into the TV, thus leaving you at the mercy of the cable TV operators, even in metropolitan areas where the digital OTA signals are strong enough and diverse enough to give you loads of options without paying a cable company. HDMI would not pass CC.

That's the explanation we were given.

I will be happy to be corrected on this, but at the time we lost CC after getting an HDTV, I went to numerous websites for the hearing impaired, and all forum members reported being in the same boat, and being stuck there, until after the last, recent stages of the implementation of the law known as the "Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010."

Regards,

Nate

Here is where the Federal Government finally had to compel TV manufacturers to include CC in the digital TV sets themselves, because they failed to do it voluntarily even though they had the capability, and had done it in analog TV sets for years, AND even though the cable TV industry was only too happy to include CC in their cable boxes, in order to make it problematic for hearing deficit people to dump cable after digital OTA transmission made cable TV otherwise virtually superfluous in major metropolitan areas:

http://www.fcc.gov/guides/display-capti ... rogramming

Implementation Date: January 1, 2014

Equipment manufactured after this date that receives or plays back video programming using a picture screen of 13 inches or larger (measured diagonally) must be capable of displaying closed captions, if technically feasible.

Respectfully,

Nate

[woodworkerjunkie]

Woodworker, I could be wrong but I would bet that you were until recently getting your closed captioning through your set-top box, probably a cable company box, and not through your TV. All well and good, except one of the main rewards to the public of switching from analog to digital TV transmission was that it eliminated the need for cable TV services in most metropolitan areas, giving you a crystal-clear TV picture with a small $50 UHF antenna.

Like many of the folks in our neighborhood, we dumped the cable TV box soon after digital OTA TV, and get all the TV we can consume over-the-air or through the hundreds of channels on our $80 Roku box. To get the advanced picture, we use HDMI on our HDTV. With analog TV, CC was built into the TV set. With digital, it was only being built into the set-top box from the cable company, and not into the TV, thus leaving you at the mercy of the cable TV operators, even in metropolitan areas where the digital OTA signals are strong enough and diverse enough to give you loads of options without paying a cable company. HDMI would not pass CC.

That's the explanation we were given.

I will be happy to be corrected on this, but at the time we lost CC after getting an HDTV, I went to numerous websites for the hearing impaired, and all forum members reported being in the same boat, and being stuck there, until after the last, recent stages of the implementation of the law known as the "Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010."

Regards,

Nate

Here is where the Federal Government finally had to compel TV manufacturers to include CC in the digital TV sets themselves, because they failed to do it voluntarily even though they had the capability, and had done it in analog TV sets for years, AND even though the cable TV industry was only too happy to include CC in their cable boxes, in order to make it problematic for hearing deficit people to dump cable after digital OTA transmission made cable TV otherwise virtually superfluous in major metropolitan areas:

http://www.fcc.gov/guides/display-capti ... rogramming

Implementation Date: January 1, 2014

Equipment manufactured after this date that receives or plays back video programming using a picture screen of 13 inches or larger (measured diagonally) must be capable of displaying closed captions, if technically feasible.

Respectfully,

Nate

This is from the link you provided, very first statement made from that page.

Closed captioning is the visual display of the audio portion of video programming. Captioning provides access to individuals who are deaf or have hearing loss and is often used in places where it is difficult to hear a TV program, such as restaurants and exercise facilities. Since 1993, the Television Decoder Circuitry Act has required television sets with screens 13 inches and greater to display closed captions. On October 8, 2010, President Obama signed the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (CVAA) into law, putting into place new mandates to give consumers access to closed captions through various other types of video devices, including many devices that are not subject to a 13-inch limitation. In January 2012, the FCC adopted rules implementing the CVAA as follows:

Back when they made the switch, we didn't have a cable box, we had basic cable service that didn't require a box. We received all the basic channels through just the cable wire connected directly to our tv, the tv itself had to do the decoding.

(from below) Notice it says Equipment using a picture screen of 13 inches or larger, not just tv's. Tv's using a picture screen of 13 inches or larger were already covered under the 1993 law. I think that "equipment" was put into the law to cover future developed products that may come into the market. That way they don't have to come back and re-write the law! I believe that the major change they were pushing is the smaller screen size and all other devices. Also to mandate to all of the devices the last point of: The rules require covered devices to enable consumers to adjust closed captions in a variety of ways, including their color (both text and background color), size, fonts, opacity, edge attributes, and language selection.

Implementation Date: January 1, 2014

Equipment manufactured after this date that receives or plays back video programming using a picture screen of 13 inches or larger (measured diagonally) must be capable of displaying closed captions, if technically feasible. Equipment with screens of less than 13 inches in size must be capable of displaying closed captions, if doing so is technically feasible as well as achievable with reasonable effort or expense.
If achievable with reasonable effort or expense, equipment manufactured after January 1, 2014 that records video programming must either enable the display of closed captions or pass through closed captions to the equipment used to view the programming. Viewers must be able to turn on and off the closed captions as the video programming is played.
Equipment

Physical devices designed to receive and play back video programming, including smartphones, tablets, personal computers, and television set-top boxes, are covered by the rules.
Equipment includes software installed by the manufacturer before the equipment is sold, as well as software that the manufacturer requires the consumer to install after the equipment is purchased.
All recording devices and removable media players (such as DVD and Blu-ray players) are covered by the rules.
Professional and commercial equipment is not covered by the rules.
Display-only monitors are not covered by the rules.
Manufacturers may seek waivers from the rules for any equipment that may be capable of receiving or playing video programming, but is primarily designed for other purposes.
The rules require covered devices to enable consumers to adjust closed captions in a variety of ways, including their color (both text and background color), size, fonts, opacity, edge attributes, and language selection.

[ems]

Good one, Lazer! Sometimes it just feels good to break the tension and laugh.

[ems]

I suppose it's a matter of who is looking at this map. It looks mighty fine to me!

And this one look fine to me:

While your map is more explicit in showing how the country voted, I think both maps look mighty good!

[NateS]

Back when they made the switch, we didn't have a cable box, we had basic cable service that didn't require a box. We received all the basic channels through just the cable wire connected directly to our tv, the tv itself had to do the decoding.

You're telling me that you had an HDTV set, connected with HDMI, and you were able to get OTA digital high definition television programs with closed captioning turned on?

I don't think that's what you're saying. You're saying that you were getting a cable signal, through a standard round cable, sent from the cable company. That's not the same thing, and that does not prove that the CC capability was supplied from within your TV set.

Respectfully,

Nate

[NateS]

Please see also, which I think explains the situation more accurately and in greater detail than I could do:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_captioning

Incompatibility issues with digital TV
Many viewers find that when they acquire a digital television or set-top box they are unable to view closed caption (CC) information, even though the broadcaster is sending it and the TV is able to display it.

Originally, CC information was included in the picture ("line 21"), but there is no equivalent capability in the HDTV 720p/1080i interconnects between the display and a "source". A "source", in this case, can be a DVD player or a terrestrial or cable digital television receiver. When CC information is encoded in the MPEG-2 data stream, only the device that decodes the MPEG-2 data (a source) has access to the closed caption information; there is no standard for transmitting the CC information to a display monitor separately. Thus, if there is CC information, the source device needs to overlay the CC information on the picture prior to transmitting to the display over the interconnect.

Many source devices do not have the ability to overlay CC information, for controlling the CC overlay can be complicated. For example, the Motorola DCT-5xxx and -6xxx cable set-top receivers have the ability to decode CC information located on the MPEG-2 stream and overlay it on the picture, but turning CC on and off requires turning off the unit and going into a special setup menu (it is not on the standard configuration menu and it cannot be controlled using the remote). Historically, DVD players, VCRs and set-top tuners did not need to do this overlaying since they simply passed this information on to the TV, and they are not mandated to perform this overlaying.

Many modern digital television receivers can be directly connected to cables, but often cannot receive scrambled channels that the user is paying for. Thus, the lack of a standard way of sending CC information between components, along with the lack of a mandate to add this information to a picture, results in CC being unavailable to many hard-of-hearing and deaf users.

Note the key phrase "the lack of a mandate" which in plain English means that until there is government regulation requiring this level of attention to provide the service, the TV industry didn't/hasn't bothered. In my humble opinion, the free enterprise system is a wonderful thing, but it does not eliminate the need for government regulation to step in when needed to protect its citizens. When necessary, government regulations and mandates can provide balance between the profit motive on the one hand, and outright greed and selfishness on the other hand.

Respectfully,

Nate

[Lizistired]

15 pages.... The bottom line is Barack won. The rich white guys with all their PAC money lost. Those that trusted Mitt were outnumbered. I'm still not sure why they did. We didn't want him kicking sand in the face of other countries. His boys were not going to fight the battles he started.
We didn't want him to de-regulate everything to increase production and profit for the 1%.
Workplace safety standards are important if you work in one.
Minimum wage is important if you are trying to live on it.
Human rights are important if you are one.
Your income should not be taxed at a lower rate if you DON'T work for it.
You shouldn't be able to funnel your assets through your church to avoid capital gains taxes while having your money returned to you at a lower rate.
Maybe the real "small business" realized they are being pimped for the 1%. Probably not.
Farm subsidies are paid to investors to keep prices low to accomodate exports and a cheap food supply.
Nothing trickles down. It never has, and it never will.

[NateS]

15 pages.... The bottom line is Barack won. The rich white guys with all their PAC money lost. Those that trusted Mitt were outnumbered. I'm still not sure why they did. We didn't want him kicking sand in the face of other countries. His boys were not going to fight the battles he started.
We didn't want him to de-regulate everything to increase production and profit for the 1%.
Workplace safety standards are important if you work in one.
Minimum wage is important if you are trying to live on it.
Human rights are important if you are one.
Your income should not be taxed at a lower rate if you DON'T work for it.
You shouldn't be able to funnel your assets through your church to avoid capital gains taxes while having your money returned to you at a lower rate.
Maybe the real "small business" realized they are being pimped for the 1%. Probably not.
Farm subsidies are paid to investors to keep prices low to accomodate exports and a cheap food supply.
Nothing trickles down. It never has, and it never will.

Well said!

Thank you Liz!

Regards,

Nate

[opticalpopsicle]

Oh yes, and TV's became very cheap too because of the gratitude of technology companies right? Wrong. They are cheap because they are made in China, where they can pay the workers a penny. They do not support jobs in America. Since I work in the healthcare field, using your analogy would mean that I should be paid only a penny, in order to bring down the price of healthcare. Thus assuring that I would not be able to buy a TV nor insurance. I can tell you it is not the healthcare workers wages that make healthcare so expensive, it is the UNINSURED that drain the healthcare system. Plus, you get in a bad car accident and are lying there screaming in pain. Do you really want the doctors and nurses that come into the room to be making minimum wage? If so, I'm pretty sure that will get you minimum care.

Did you have a bad night on your cpap last night and in a "fog" today? Most things you buy in this country today was made in China! I'm sure if you took the time to look around your own house, you will find most small appliances are made in China! So, I guess that means you agree with China only paying their "workers a penny"? Just because you buy something that was made in China, does not mean that you agree with how workers are payed there! Anymore than your statement that Sleep2Die4's analogy would mean that you should be paid only a penny, in order to bring down the price of healthcare.

You took the whole concept of free enterprise and tried to turn it into, who knows what! The point he was making, is called free market competition! The more choices a person has, is a good thing! It helps because companies know in order to try to get someone to purchase their products or services, they have to keep the price down and quality up! That includes having products made elsewhere, so they can stay competitive! Same thing in the medical field, if you have more insurance companies competing, the quality and price of the policies become more competitive! Same with Hospitals, Doctors...etc! No one is saying that you need your wages cut! That is something that came out of your own mouth!

They are cheap because they are made in China, where they can pay the workers a penny. They do not support jobs in America.

Example: Joe decides he will not take his company overseas to produce his tv. He will only use american made parts and american labor. First problem Joe has is trying to find all the parts that he needs, because a lot of those parts are not made in america! He finally has a company that agrees to make all the parts that he needs. Those parts will probably cost him somewhere between 3 to 10 times more than the imported parts. Then he is in a non right to work state (union), so he has to pay union scale wages to assemble this tv. When all is said and done, Joe's tv will probably be of lesser quality and double if not triple, or more, the cost of a comparable import! How many people do you think, is going to buy Joe's tv? How long do you think Joe will be able to stay in business?

Kinda reminds me of what is happening with Hostess! Bye, Bye my friend!

Woodworkerjunkie....try to keep up with the storyline. I was explaining that TV's are cheap now, because ChicagoGranny didn't seem to know. Of course everyone outsources now, it is the new American way. The almighty dollar. I think it is deplorable, but maybe my opinion doesn't matter. How lovely of you to provide me with a redundant lesson on why paying $0.02 for labor for your widget makes for a cheaper product than paying $2.00 in labor for the same widget. I guess you feel smart now.

That is fine about crossing state lines for insurance to keep monopolies in check. But do you think that really will help enough? I don't. Hospitals still will charge $500 every 15 minutes to have the ICU patient on the machine that goes beep because they are trying to make up for the hoardes of uninsured that can't pay the bill. I have news for everybody....if you use the healthcare system, you are ALREADY paying for the uninsured. Is President Obama's ACA flawed? Probably. Because it is a compromise bill. But that is not the point. The whole point is that the ACA is the stepping stone to *GASP!* a single-payer system. Healthcare is not going to become affordable until it is no longer allowed to be driven by profit.

[NateS]

That is fine about crossing state lines for insurance to keep monopolies in check. But do you think that really will help enough? I don't. Hospitals still will charge $500 every 15 minutes to have the ICU patient on the machine that goes beep because they are trying to make up for the hoardes of uninsured that can't pay the bill. I have news for everybody....if you use the healthcare system, you are ALREADY paying for the uninsured. Is President Obama's ACA flawed? Probably. Because it is a compromise bill. But that is not the point. The whole point is that the ACA is the stepping stone to *GASP!* a single-payer system. Healthcare is not going to become affordable until it is no longer allowed to be driven by profit.

Amen! Amen!

Medicare, our single-payer system, is the only near-efficient health "insurance" system, despite the fraud that has to be rooted out. Why? Because the so-called "Private Health Insurance Companies" are a false industry. They serve no public good, other than to siphon off huge amounts of the public's money intended to pay for healthcare, paying it out instead in false profits to their shareholders and obscene salaries and bonuses to CEOs. To "insure" against the need for healthcare is as ridiculous a concept as to "insure" against the need for water when you turn on the tap. Anyone who immediately retorts that this thinking is "socialism" doesn't understand that even under the free enterprise system, certain needs for services cannot be efficiently met and need to be excepted from the market and provided by government. I say this with degrees in Business Administration and years of experience working in the insurance industry, which convinced me that there are many legitimate risks to insure against with private ins. companies, but healthcare is not one of them.

The truth is that there is much more fraud in the private health insurance industry than there is in Medicare, the difference being that it is being committed by the insurance industry itself against the majority of the public, whereas in Medicare it is committed by a much smaller group of providers and a small percentage of patients and is being rooted out.

Read "Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans" by Wendell Potter.

http://www.amazon.com/Deadly-Spin-Insur ... eadly+spin

The private health insurance industry knows that all they have to do periodically is yell Halloween chants like "Socialism!" and "Save the American Way!" and a certain element of the population will spring into action against their own self-interests for improvement and change. Fortunately, even when combined with the wealthy, they no longer appear to constitute a voting majority. Fewer people now allow themselves to be fooled.

Regards,

Nate