Unsurprisingly, an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) - once a luxury for room-sized computer installations - is now a standard item both in home offices and all the networked tiers above, protecting servers and online service providers, Internet backbones, phone companies, and even cable TV networks.
Conservatives, despite their increasingly powerful presence on cable TV and talk radio, feel excluded and disregarded by the longstanding preponderance of liberal voices on public television.
But by showing us live coverage of every bad thing happening everywhere in the world, cable news makes life seem like it's just an endless string of disasters - when, for most people in most places today, life is fairly good.
It's been possible for years to use a PC to watch and record over-the-air television broadcasts, and unencrypted cable television tuners have been available almost as long. But for a long time, you could only watch copyright-protected channels with a cable company-leased box.
I have no problem at all going back and forth between cable and network.
Everything is relative. Is the Internet fast? Not for most people. Is it always on? Yes, for cable modem and DSL users but that represents a tiny percentage of users.
In the old days you could do re-runs, and people would have to watch that because there's nothing else. But with Netflix and Amazon, Hulu, Xbox, as well as premium and regular cable, it's very hard to do that.
I think that cable TV is a great venue to do something interesting.
The cable package continues to be the greatest value in the history of entertainment. The average hour watched on cable television costs between 15 and 25 cents. For most people who cannot afford other kinds of entertainment, it is their entertainment.
When regulations restricting competition are relaxed, nobody's market share is protected. If telephone companies can offer video programming, cable revenue will surely drop.
In general, when I watch cable news during the day, it's frustrating because it reminds me of a game show. If I want to watch 'The Price is Right,' I'll watch 'The Price is Right.'
If you go to certain cable news shows, you're generally going to hear the viewpoints that you already have reported back to you. I think there's no harm in that.
You can cut the fat from your spending: Stop taking taxis, call your cable company and ask for the same deal new subscribers get, have dinner at home and then a drink out instead of a $100 meal with wine.
Broadcasting for advertisers is still the best game in town, and they know it. Look, I admire a lot of the shows on cable. I think 'Mad Men' is wonderful. I think 'Breaking Bad' is wonderful. But let's remember they're about one-tenth the audience of NCIS.
I watch sports and cable news. I'm a political junkie, so that's my interest.
I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer's office above the coffee shop where we'd been having lunch that day. And so I sent a cable to my father saying, 'By the time you get this, Daddy, I'll already be Mrs. Blaise!'
Now, you watch cable news, and you know what everybody's going to say before they open their mouth.
And I was asked if I would come and help with the recovery of this great British company, Cable and Wireless, and I'm delighted to become part of the new and very talented management that have been brought in to that company as well.
I think you could argue that President Obama could have watched a little cable news... I do think that there is value in understanding where the conversation is and having a little less detachment where the popular conversation is.
The great thing about working in cable is that, since the season is truncated - we only do 12 shows - the writers are more at ease in terms of mapping out the trajectory of the story and the characters.
What NDS did is allow us to move into video capability with large service providers or cable providers - and the ability to do this out of the cloud. And that allows you to do it faster.
There's discussion in athletics about how sport - where they say 'SportsCenter' has ruined the fundamentals of basketball because it's - it only applauds dunks and three point shots and blocks, and I think, you know, the cable news has done the same thing for politics.
In the cable news arena, you have two partisan networks looking out for their viewers. I think CNN needs to look out for the rest of us.
All things take time. A lot of my films still run on cable and are in video stores, and there's a whole generation that doesn't know who I am. So, it's a dichotomy. In some people's minds I may never grow up.
Magazines that depend on photography, and design, and long reads, and quality stuff, are going to do just fine despite the Internet and cable news.
I have actually directed over thirty plays and about one hundred commercials for cable TV, but have not yet had the opportunity to direct a feature film.
All of the people who are using their BlackBerries or their iPhones, Facebook, all of the people who are sitting in cafes and hotels rooms doing their work, they're all using wireless technology, and we shouldn't assume that the only way of the future is high speed cable.
Human attention is limited, and a massive number of newly browsable books from the long tail necessarily compete with the biggest best-sellers, just as cable siphons audience from the major networks, and just as the Web pulls viewers from TV.
When you look at what you get in a cable subscription, it is a spectacular value. For $70 or $80 a month is what it would cost a family of four to go to the movies one time.
A lot of consumers actively enjoy advertising, especially fashion print ads and clever TV commercials. The nostalgic cable channel TVLand features not only vintage shows but also vintage commercials.
Summer is a great opportunity for all of cable. People love to find original episodes.
You really can create a lot of value by putting content and distribution together, particularly if the content is cable content.
For years, broadcasters didn't get a nickel out of retransmission consent. But broadcast content is what the cable industry was selling to customers.
The FCC has made it clear it would punish a cable or phone company for deviating from providing 'neutral' access.
Cable's on fire. Traditional broadcast TV's hearing a death knell. I sample as much television as possible. I like 'Homeland,' 'Game of Thrones,' 'Veep.' Now reinvention's important.
As you have two more huge characters as Cable and Domino, 'Deadpool' is growing, and it's making 'X-Force' franchise bigger and bigger.