No member meeting on 3/28

CSB notes 3/21/07

First of all: There is no member meeting this week! Come to Elixer at 16th & Guerrero in the Mission at 9 on Wednesday for Springtoberfest! Sorry it's taken me a little while to get this info up, I've been super busy.

Big news on campus: We got our graduation funding! It’s official!

The strike vote passed overwhelmingly and our campus was the one with the highest positive vote of any CSU campus, probably because the cost if living is so high here. The strike is going to be sometime in April. I’ll keep you posted. There's rumors that an agreement might be reached, so it's still sort of up in the air.

Also, Abtin won his election, so say congratulations if you see him. He's going to be around next year, and I'm sure he'll be pulling for us.

FCC:

I found an article about HDTV and what it’s all about. For those of you who don’t know, it has been mandated that on Feb 17^th 2009 all television will have to be broadcast in the HD format. This is a transitional time for the medium, much like the advent of color back in the old days. People are upset about it, but it’s the way o the future and all of you should know about it. Some detailed info here:

LINK

The next article I found is about the idea of sending out broadband internet over the airwaves in so-called ‘white spaces’ between channels 2 and 51 in the regular spectrum. Microsoft and Google have both submitted devices for testing to FCC which could utilize this space. They call it Wi-Fi on steroids, and as always, the fight over our limited spectrum is being fought between giants, when in reality it’s owned by you and me. Anyway, this could become a big story soon:

LINK

Here’s a little update on the Sirius-XM merger. Critics had been saying that the FCC might treat this like the merger between two major satellite television companies, DirecTV and Dish, which was not accepted. The FCC is arguing that in that it would have made the choices to limited to consumers. But this isn’t the case with satellite radio. What? Their reasoning is something like this: thanks to AM, FM, CDs, iPods, DVDs, etc, people have more than a few choices when it comes to choosing what to listen to in their cars. So this means they might let this merger happen. I think this would be a bad thing, but here’s the article in case you want to learn more:

LINK

The FCC has given their blessing to HD radio, meaning that now stations don't need special permission to begin to broadcast in the new format. This means that the same bandwidth can now hold about five times as many radio stations, which is going to mean more choice for consumers. You can read about it here:

LINK

Now for a quick update on the Google/Viacom lawsuit: Google is confident that Youtube has done nothing wrong, Viacom says that their copyrighted clips have been viewed over 1.5 billion times. Here’s a great break down of the details:

LINK

CSB:

Eva needs help with her creative project! Talk to her about it!

Conan O’Brien is coming to San Francisco and I want tickets. Go to www.nbc.com/conan/sanfrancisco for information on reserving tickets. I really really really really want to go. St. Patrick’s day was damn fun, Blake has another event this weekend but I can’t make it. Also, I’m backing out of the NAB conference. I had planned to go, but in the end it didn’t make sense for me. I’m going to go next year for sure though.

For those of you who want to go, here's the NAB website and the convention itself. See you at Elixer!