Plus, Everybody Should Watch Extra Credits

For this week, I decided to pick a bit of news that isn't so much an article as much as it is a video. See, I went on an archive binge of Extra Credits, and then it had a lot of crappy updates that lacked real content, and I lost interest, so I've started yet another archive binge. If you have no idea what Extra Credits is, I fully recommend checking it out. It's almost always just interesting things about developing video games as a form of media and exploring the potential that they have for telling a fantastic story.

This episode, however, focuses more on discussing an issue that society is going to face pretty soon much more universally: spectrum crunch. The video explains it much more thoroughly than I can, but to sum up, we are running out of bandwidth in the air for transmitting data across large distances. At the rate we're going, we'll likely run out of space by 2014. This will be disastrous, and it's already leading to increases in costs for cell phone and internet access.

The most apparent way to fix this issue, at least temporarily, is for television networks to stop broadcasting over-the-air. For some incredibly rural areas though, this is the only real way that they can get live news and such, and some people might argue that eliminating their access to television is not the solution.

That being said, this is not an issue that's going to go away anytime soon, and it'll only get worse until more people are aware of it and trying to actually fix it. If I had more time, I would do a little more research to post about all of the potential solutions that have been proposed. Unfortunately though, I have classes and such to get to, so hopefully this video is enough of a starting point to encourage getting educated on this impending doom.