{"id":72,"date":"2008-04-27T20:24:34","date_gmt":"2008-04-28T03:24:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=72"},"modified":"2008-04-28T09:18:41","modified_gmt":"2008-04-28T16:18:41","slug":"ac-to-dc-by-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=72","title":{"rendered":"AC to DC by 2020?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;d heard about the upcoming transition from analog to digital TV signals, although I hadn&#8217;t really paid attention to the date (February 17, 2009) since I don&#8217;t actually watch TV.  What did pique my interest was the fact that the U.S. government is offering <b>subsidies<\/b> to households who do not procure a digital TV before the switchover date.  If you still &#8220;only&#8221; have an analog TV, you can get a $40 coupon for a converter to enable you to continue getting your TV fix.  No, wait: one TV per household certainly doesn&#8217;t satisfy our modern demands!  That might require that the whole family watch the <i>same<\/i> show at the <i>same<\/i> time.  But those clever guys at the Department of Commerce (guess who wants you watching more TV?) are one step ahead: you can now get this subsidy for <b>two<\/b> TVs per household!  Now that&#8217;s America in action.  We&#8217;ll show the world who&#8217;s a first-world country, and who can&#8217;t even get their constituents <b>one<\/b> TV per household.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" width=150 class=\"floatRight\" src=\"http:\/\/www.swop.net\/uploaded_images\/Lightbulb-760506.jpg\">The real point of this post, though, is about a different mandated transition that I recently discovered.  By 2020, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.csl.sri.com\/users\/neumann\/insiderisks08.html#214\">the DIRECT initiative mandates that all public and private power grids in the country be converted from AC to DC power<\/a> &#8212; and by 2030, all new devices must be able to plug into this DC power bonanza without needing a converter.  DIRECT stands for Development Initiative for Return to Edison Current Technology, and it&#8217;s sure to have Tesla rolling in his grave.  When did this happen?  Why wasn&#8217;t I told?  This is a change that could have real potential for affecting my life!<\/p>\n<p>I wasn&#8217;t told because apparently it&#8217;s all &#8230; an April Fool&#8217;s joke.  The above link is to Lauren Weinstein&#8217;s column in the April issue of Communications of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.acm.org\/\">ACM<\/a>, in which it is presented without apology or caveat (although with the title &#8220;A Current Affair&#8221; and an exceedingly poor pun in the final paragraph).  Googling to find out more about the &#8220;initiative&#8221; revealed its positioning as a satire piece.  So what I learned today was: don&#8217;t trust the ACM!  At least not in April. :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;d heard about the upcoming transition from analog to digital TV signals, although I hadn&#8217;t really paid attention to the date (February 17, 2009) since I don&#8217;t actually watch TV. What did pique my interest was the fact that the U.S. government is offering subsidies to households who do not procure a digital TV before [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}