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Star Trek Home Theater
Critical Facilities writes "Someone thought it would be a good idea to model their home theater after the Enterprise NCC-1701D from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The result is super geeky, but actually rather cool. Named the best theme theater installation at CEDIA 2007, this Palm Beach County, FL home features motion-activated air-lock doors with series sound effects, and a "Red Alert" button on the Crestron TPMC-10 controller to turn all of the LEDs bright red and flashing."
The view from the back would be about as poor as watching a normal-sized screen. But I do like the table element they have going with the worf arc (whatever you called that thing he stood behind.) If you're doing dinnner and a movie, it's nice to have that stuff right in front of you. Of course, with comfy chairs that lay back, you'll end up dropping food all over yourself. The last thing you want to do in a Star Trek-themed room is look like Jabba -- mixing shows is considered very gauche these days.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
about those 3,816 DVDs he's admitted to copying???
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
The ceiling wouldn't be that hard to do. Use a CNC router to mill a clay mould, then vacuum-form plastic sheet over it. TechShop in Silicon Valley has all the gear for that, and there are shops that do large-area vacuum forming. Up to 6' x 11' vacuum forming of single pieces is commercially available.
Much of the "future" that comes from Hollywood is made by vacuum forming. It's cheap.
If it weren't for debt, you wouldn't need 30 years worth of money to buy a home.
The debt environment artificially inflates real estate pricing because people can "afford" more. They don't end up with a bigger home, they just pay more for the same old pile of dirt. How many people would own homes if it weren't for mortages ? More than you think, because everyone needs a home. What ? You think the land owners and banks would sit idly, waiting for that one wealthy buyer per thousand ? No, they would adapt, or else we would mob them!
Seriously, it's a low-tech box made of concrete and wood, supposed to protect people from the elements and from other people. How such a basic device could come to be worth half a million or more is beyond logic.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
"The real problem lies within the buyer"? On what planet at this time would that be? Have you watched any of these home-selling shows on HGTV lately? (I'm a care-giver and it's very popular where I do volunteer work.) A great deal of the problem -- and thus, the "hold up" you mention -- is all too often the sellers trying to get two or three times the amount of money they've invested in the house. That's no exaggeration; I saw a show once in which the seller had bought the house for $95,000, invested about $40,000 in remodeling and was trying to sell it for $375,000. He only got $300,000 and bitched about for the last 5 minutes of the show. Jesus, $165,000 wasn't enough of a profit? That was a rather extreme case, but I've seen a lot of others on that show. On pretty much every episode, the sellers inflate the price to at least double what they've spent on the property. It's pure greed that has inflated the cost of a home to absolutely ridiculous levels, and folks like you wonder why it takes so long to sell a house? Duh, not only do your potential buyers have to get a loan for a humongous amount of money, and most likely these "ignorant" people are looking at other houses too -- why the hell shouldn't they? More than anything, artificially inflating prices like this -- not just on homes but on many, many things like cars -- is why we have a debt-based society. So what the hell are you griping about? They have to go through a hell of a lot more trouble to than you do. You sound just like the greedy jerks on that show, bitching that people just don't fall head over heels in love with your house the moment they see it and immediately puke a few hundred grand all over you, no matter how much the house is actually worth.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.