Computer Museum of America on Tuesday night's PBS NOVA (fwd)

Satallite TV isn't an effort thing... it is a how bad do I want to be ripped off by cable thing. (Remember, these are 18" dishes... they are popping up all over the place) Around here, Basic Cable (40 channels, no HBO or nothing) costs $62.00 a month. $10 more for each pay channel you want (HBO, Cinimax, Stars, Encore, TMC, or Showtime). Satallite TV (Dish Network) gives me 200+ channels, PLUS all the pay channels (5 HBO, 3 Cinimax, tons of others... roughly 40 pay channels in all), PLUS country wide "superstations" (WB, UPN, so I can watch Smallville 3 times every tuesday... cause Enterprise sucks so I have to have SOME show to be addicted to) PLUS local broadcast networks (no biggie, I can put an arial up for those), PLUS something like 200 music channels (those things that play a screen saver while playing music) All for $70 a month (I have to pay $5 for my 2nd decoder connection, so really it is $65 a month). So for $3 more than cable, I get more channels that I can count. Only downside... one channel per decoder, two decoders per dish for normal setup (you can go as high as 8 or 9 with some Channel Plus hardware). But that downside matters not to me... the lean-to I live in doesn't make it easy to watch two diferent channels as is... 3 would be sensory overload. And the video quality of Satallite vs Cable isn't even a comparison. But then, if you are a person that can't see the difference between VHS video and DVD video, you probably won't care about that aspect. -chris <http://www.mythtech.net>