December 2006 Archives

A safe and happy holiday season to my three regular readers, and anyone else who stumbles across this corner of the net.

The Sty will be in recess for the next month with even less posts than normal. (Hard to believe, I know!)

In fact, we may be off the air for a period of time. The ancient PC on which I host the site needs urgent attention, and one of the drawbacks of not paying someone to host the site is compromised availability.

We're looking forward to the coming NSW State and Federal elections.

See you next year.

Anyone with an interest in AFL footy knows knows channels Seven and Ten have a problem with their new five year agreement to broadcast all eight weekend games into Sydney and Brisbane. Quite simply, the free to air channels in the rugby dominated eastern states won't be able to absorb that many AFL games.

It seems the broadcasters thought Foxtel would stump up some (well, a lot, actually) cash to televise four of the games, but Fox wouldn't accept the asking price. So the "free to airs" are now committed to telecast the code at peak viewing times into eastern cities that have little interest in the seven games that aren't featuring the local team.

(Note: As an AFL tragic, I'm an exception to the above generalisation.)

Solutions are being sort by the broadcasters to relieve themselves of their obligation, including showing the matches on little watched community TV stations. But there's an easy to implement, "available right now" solution to their problem, and it's only government regulation that's standing in the way.

It's called digital multi-channelling.

Every free to air broadcaster has enough bandwidth to simultaneously broadcast at least two digital channels simultaneously. The ABC and SBS are already doing this. It only takes an inexpensive set top box to allow a standard analogue TV to show the additional channels.

As I understand it, the commercial broadcasters fought against multi-channelling, and the government, ever mindful not to upset media barrons, agreed to disallow the service. It's ironic that the system they fought against could offer a solution to their AFL rights dilemma.

Digital TV has a low take up rate, unsurprisingly when one considers that there's no real advantage in acquiring the technology. High definition is hardly a "must have," and the lame programming on the ABC's and SBS's second channels hardly makes the effort worthwhile.

Perhaps the AFL and Seven / Ten should get together and try to get the restrictions on multi-channelling lifted.

If they were successful, I'd be racing to buy a digital set top box the next day.

Eric at Surfdom brings up a disturbing subject that I've been meaning to write about for the past month, ie, the phenomenon of 'positive feedback' accelerating the process of climate change. He cites the example of the shrinking of the Arctic ice cap exposing increasing amounts of sea water to the sun, making it warm up quicker, causing more ice to melt, causing more heating ...

You get the picture.

But that's not the only example. The fires burning throughout Eastern Australia are pumping millions of tons of C02 into the atmosphere. Longer periods of drought allows the bush to burn more frequently, but doesn't allow the vegetation to grow back. The C02 permanently released into the atmosphere accelerates the global warming process.

Then there's the human influence ...

Getting warmer? Buy an air conditioner! Burn more fossil fuel to power it ...

Climate change induced water shortage? Desalination is the answer. Just crank up the coal burning power stations to keep the water flowing.

Positive feedback is causing previous predictions of climate change consequences to look very conservative. We have less time to act than previously thought.