One would have to look at the statistics, I suppose...
dti.uk was on about compliance with the EU mandate to migrate analog to digital since 1998, captured market, tax + VAT or no tax. (have you noticed, that and the HH council poll tax are subjects Britons are loathe to challenge.)
Here, coleman's ignorance of planned obsolescence of band (FM/AM/BB/WiFi) auctioned concessions demonstrates one thing: parliamentarian resistance in Ireland to not-free market communication.
Booyah. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
Also, are we endorsing the use of a TV as a nanny, now? Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith
Not to belabour the point, but I think that the argument that Internet access is limited by cost is fairly soft.
Perhaps the technical knowledge issue is more important. One can construct an excellent high-performance workstation from parts obtained by end-of-term dumpster diving at Colorado College. However, the rich college kids take their TVs back home with them...
It would be almost unheard of for all but the absolute poorest families not to have at least one PC now. It's practically a school requirement.
I was talking to a friend who does front-line adult ed in some of the rougher part of London earlier in the week, and she was saying that many of her pupils have surprisingly solid basic IT skills.
What they don't have is the ability to write and spell well enough to get a job that lets them use them.
It's not a good computer, or a computer that I'd buy, but it'll let you got on ET or YouTube without a hitch.
OTOH, design life might be a problem. Because most people replace their computers every few years, they seem to have a design life of only about five years, whereas a TV's design life can easily be ten years - heck, fifteen if you're lucky.
I've never actually owned a TV, so I don't know what a cheap TV costs.
- Jake
[1] For the tower - give it another hundred for screen, keyboard and mouse. Unless you can inherit those - they usually last longer than the box they come with (my own screen and keyboard are on their third or fourth tower). If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
most people replace their computers every few years
um, no. this is fallacy brought from yon by stale corporate HW/software investment stats. turnover/upgrade has been in decline since the dot com crash -- explaining in part, for example, the conspicuous IBM exit from PC (enter Lonovo) by 2005 that complemented its lucrative syst-integration rent biz, H-P and Dell cycles of revenue shocks.
the "early adopter" segment of semiconductor/GUI market is small but very vocal: consider how often and how many column inches MSM gives "analysts." blogging environments are actually fine proxy for purchase incentives and planned obsolescence promulgated by such users... in turn explaining why commentors here have trouble imagining (1) working poor have no time for IP; (2) children of the poor are not barriers to public PC access, when extended family are primarily childcare providers, in any case, to Ideal™ parent custody.
nonetheless, like that of the passenger vehicle, the life-cycle of the desktop PC and other durables in consumer households exceeds allowed depreciation schedules by a factor of 3, easily. however, one could attribute moore's law in semi, expansive consumer credit, and kewl cross-platform entertainment/ISP functionalities (e.g. PSP, Nintendo ?!, "3G" mobile/cell) to erosion of PC replacement market. yeah, actually more people worldwide own mobile/cell than either tv or PC.
Check out this public monitor on penetration by device by region (dig): internetworldstats.com ... Asia's density has been ahead of ROW for sometime ...
OMG, mapnet is back up!!! Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
