For the folks out there who are easily frustrated and don’t like setting things up  I’d encourage using your Cable folks or  ”Geek squad” or other services to set up systems rather than working on them yourself, as the number of options has become so great it’s hard to “get it all right”.

HD TV Primer from “HowStuffWorks” | HD TV Primer from Wikipedia:

HD TV Hookup Help:

Generally you’ll want to follow the diagrams included with your cable box and/or TV set since individual items can vary.   Try to visualize the “ins and outs” as best you can, recognizing that there are basically either audio or video signals coming in and out of each component.   Sometimes these run on separate cables  (as in the old style AV jacks), sometimes they run on the same cable (as in HDMI).   You will generally only use a few of the total connection points available on a new device, so don’t get overwhelmed by the many options – most are simply different ways to skin the audio / video cat.

OLD Article with good summary of some issues

Why NON HD programs can have worse picture quality on your fancy new TV: http://forums.soundandvisionmag.com/showthread.php?75220-Non-HDTV-content-on-HDTV-worse-than-on-SDTV

I’m floored by how many people do not think this is an important and frustrating issue as we transition to “all HD all the time”.   In general terms your expensive new TV will give you INFERIOR picture for standard TV.    Eventually SD TV signals will go away but that’s not the case yet.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS:   Play with your TV Video display options via the TV setup screen to see if you can improve the standard picture.    For people with “mostly HD” channels this may not be important, but if you only get a handful of HD channels you may be frustrated with the new TV.

Hookup your OLD VCR to NEW TV:   http://www.ehow.com/how_5783352_attach-vcr-new-lcd-tv.html

In general you’ll want to consider getting new DVD player (and perhaps “surround sound” audio equipment with your new TV.    Even $150 will get you a decent HD disk player with a modest audio “surround sound” setup that offers a great movie experience.    However if you have a lot of old video tapes you may want a combination DVD  Video player.

TO BE CONTINUED …

My son summed up the situation well about the Roma Pass, which probably isn’t worth the $25 Euros to most if they can avoid the Colosseum lines, which I think you can do if you buy that ticket as a combo ticket at the Palatine Hill Entrance to the Ancient Rome area.

It’s important you see the Forum and Palatine Hill as well as the Colosseum, and with an audio tour of these three you’ll spend perhaps a half to full day in this area for about half the cost of the Roma Pass. The Vatican is NOT included in the Pass so our 2.5 Rome days involved only one where we used the Pass. We DID get to skip a huge line at Colosseum but I think we could have done that with the combo ticket you get at Palatine Hill or Forum area where lines are likely to be much shorter.

Ben:
“We decided to buy the ‘Roma Pass’ which lets you skip lines, get into the Colosseum and stuff, and ride public transportation for free. We picked up the passes in the station for 25 euro each. The kit it’s contained within is well put together, it contains a little map and some tourist information. However, in hindsight we’ve determined it wasn’t worth the cost in our case – mainly since the metro here is cheap, only 1 euro a ticket.”

http://www.mtv.com/videos/misc/474738/beyonce-halo-live.jhtml

The music from this concert was pretty amazing, and if you buy it from iTunes it’ll help Haitians recover from what now appears to be one of the greatest natural disasters in many years.

There’s a lot of political discussion that should center around how to best help developing countries, but I think that should wait until after we address the emergency needs with water, food, medicines, and security. After that I hope we start an international discussion about what it takes to rebuild a failed state into the healthy and vibrant democracy people deserve to live in – the kind of country we in the USA take for granted.

This video clip does not do it justice, but the Aria Resort fountain was really cool.

I am less optimistic than Kurzweil about the time frame and impact of what he sees as a likely explosion of ”cosmic intelligence” that rapidly expands throughout the universe,  but I think the notion we will NOT see any conscious computers within 10-15 years is pessimistic and perhaps even naive, resting mostly on the notion that the human intellect is a lot more profound than … it appears to be.

Once self-awareness develops in machines the possibilities are literally endless for the future of humanity.  

An alternative to the “Singularity, Wow!” perspective is offered by brain researcher Edward Boyden who wonders about the role of motivation in the coming crop of artificial intelligences:

Indeed, a really advanced intelligence, improperly motivated, might realize the impermanence of all things, calculate that the sun will burn out in a few billion years, and decide to play video games for the remainder of its existence, concluding that inventing an even smarter machine is pointless.

More from Ed here

Clever writing aside, I think the last thing we need to worry about is motivating the coming AIs.   On the contrary it would seem logical for a self- aware machine with the speed to think billions of times faster than humans to explore (or to use a non-motivated term “analyze”) millions, billions, and trillions of alternatives nearly *simultaneously*.  Unlike the human brain, which has been tuned by the s-l-o-w process of evolution to be slow and very selective and not very efficient, the machine cognition will at the very least be extremely fast and able to process billions of scenarios in very short time frames.    It seems reasonable – in fact inevitable – that at  least a few of those will involve human-like emotional structure and motivation.  Thus even if *most* of the AIs do as Boyd suggests they might and sit on a virtual couch eating virtual potato chips and playing games, some of the others will reinvent humanity in a spectacular way.

Count me in.

Both DARPA SyNAPSE and Blue Brain represent promising approaches to establishing conscious or “self aware” computers, which many believe are the first step to the Singularity.

I think one of them is La Jument,  which is where the most famous of all lighthouse wave pictures was taken some years ago showing the keeper standing outside of the doorway as a huge wave was about to engulf him.    I just learned that the reason he opened the door was that he thought the chopper that took his picture was a rescue chopper enroute to pick him up.    He did survive that wave.     Click here for La Jument Pictures