As some of you may know, in the past few months Comcast has been caught with tampering. And when I say tampering, I mean they have been monitoring internet activity and bottlenecking certain users that have been downloading from torrent sites.
Most of you may be screaming to yourself "What?!", some of you are nodding in agreement and patting yourselves on the back for already knowing this, and the rest of you have no idea what I'm talking about.
Well, a recently posted article on digg (when I say recent, I mean I dugg it when it had only 95 diggs) claims that Comcast could be fined by as much as $1.77 trillion.
TREEEEELLION.
That's a lotta cash. But let's face it - after the lawyers get into the fray, that number may dwindle. Who knows, maybe we Comcast customers will get some kind of compensation, whether we knew about these activities or not. That'd be nice, huh? I doubt that would happen, though.
But $1.77 trillion is definitely a strange number. And I'll explain how. Just give me a few moments to elaborate.
Every now and then, when my pockets are empty or if I don't feel like going to the theater or renting/buying a Blu-ray movie, I download the torrent. Yes, I'm the same person who, in a previous post, may have sounded like he was the biggest HD elitist of all time and deemed anyone who buys DVD's and downloads torrents as idiots.
So I guess I have conformed a little bit recently. I've downloaded several torrent movies (Charlie Wilson's War, Atonement, Waitress, Michael Clayton, and The Lives of Others), but I would only watch them on my Viewsonic LCD monitor connected to my PowerBook. Up close, they look horrible. When I watch from several feet away, the video quality is okay, but obviously nowhere near HD content or the Blu-ray disc format.
Anyway, movies have different original aspect ratios (OAR). There's a small group of people in the world that prefer to have a constant 2.35:1 ratio for their projectors. Obviously movies with OAR's of 2.35 or 2.40 look fine on this, and even 1.85 movies look decent too, but 4:3 movies (SD channels and such) look way too small. But they are fine with this, and personally, if I were able to afford such a setup, I would in a heartbeat.
Then there are people that still use 4:3 TV's (like pretty much almost everyone). The TV in my bedroom is a 5-year old 4:3 (1.33:1 ratio) Panasonic flat CRT, and it's fine. 1.85:1 movies look fine on it (though I rarely play DVD's on it), but 2.35 and 2.40 movies are just way to small-looking. The black bars on the top and bottom are huge.
Lastly, there are 16:9 television sets. I have one in the livingroom, and while it's only a 40" LCD, it does display in 1080p, and it does its job just fine. HDTV's at your local Best Buy or Circuit City are 16:9.
Which finally brings me to my point.
All HDTV channels display in 16:9 format. Sometimes there are black bars on the top and the bottom for movies that have 1.85, 2.35 or 2.40. Generally, HD-filmed shows are 16:9.
16:9 also happens to be a 1.77:1 ratio. From experience, I already knew that but just in case, I double checked with this massive calculator at work.
1.77 ratio, $1.77 trillion.
It all makes sense now. Right? Right!
And just in case you were wondering, if Comcast were to be fined 1.7 trillion Schrute Bucks, that would equate to $17.7 quadrillion.
How did I figure that out? Simple. I analyzed a scan of an actual Schrute Buck (pictured below) to find out the ratio of Schrute Bucks to US dollars. Then I did this thing called math. I could be wrong. You're free to check it out for yourself. In fact, I dare you to double check. Also, I'll give you 10,000 Schrute Bucks if you can figure out how much $1.77 trillion is in Schrute Bucks.
I'll post the answer on Friday because I have a feeling nobody will have read up to this point and what I type now doesn't even really matter. I guess I can just type whatever I want at this point. Muhahaha! I like Jake Gyllenhaal's hair and McDreamy's too! Hahahahaha! YESSS!!!
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