media what died a'bornin'

[John Foust]

At 01:47 PM 10/8/2004, Fred Cisin wrote:
>In the U.S., the "closed caption" system, which is primarily for
>text for hard of hearing folk, puts two bytes of ASCII into line 21
>of the VBI (vertical blanking interval).  It CAN be used for other
>purposes.

These days, PC-based video cards decode it, too, and use it
to trigger events...  e.g., as soon as they mention "Hitler",
record 30 minutes, or beep, etc.  

- John