The Proposed Cable a la Carte Plans Aren't at all for Your
Benefit  The talk earlier this week of cable companies proposing
a la carte cable plans made it sound like they actually wanted
to do something for their customers. Well as IT World explains,
the cable companies still reek of greed.  According to Kevin
Fogarty, the ulterior motive behind this a la carte push is to
transform in demand (and costly) channels such as ESPN into HBO-
esque premium channels. Most channels would still be packaged as
a bundle.  Skyrocketing TV broadcast deal costs have come down
the line to cable companies, however, forcing them to pay as
much as $4 per subscriber to run ESPN, according to cable-
industry research firm SNL Kagan.  Niche special-interest
channels like the History of Knitting Channel, on the other
hand, either get onto channel listings free in order to fill out
the list and make it more impressive-looking, or actually have
to pay to be included (presumably in handmade socks; there
hasn't been a lot of money in kni