Wow. I haven't read such a misogynist comment on Slashdot since...um...maybe... ever?
Repeating the slanders - and justifying them - is just, well, it's wrong. It's bad behavior. And it's not to the point of the original post. It's what's known as an 'ad hominem' attack.
And somehow this got modded to '5 - Insightful'. Which means there are a few other people out there who are clearly just as misogynist. That's even more disturbing, because had I points today, this would have been modded down to '-1 - Troll'.
Please, please try to be kind. Someday you might be a celebrity, yourself.
Please do not confuse a free market with an anti-market. Something that is as highly controlled (rightly or wrongly) as the radio spectrum doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of being a free market. This is, in fact, nearly the textbook definition of an anti-market, where economic entities collude with governments to retain market control.
If you want real free markets, then you don't regulate at all. No spectrum allocations, no power regulations, nothing. Of course, that's chaos. So what do we do? We use governmental institutions to balance the needs of all stakeholders. And Skype is quite definitely a stakeholder in this area.
Everyone, everywhere, needs more competition; that's not just a good idea, it's a Natural Law. Eventually, the telcos will learn this.
As someone who just received Permanent Residency visa status in Australia, I can tell you why to come here: the people, and the weather. The people are marvelously laid-back, happy, engaging and - for the most part - very open minded. The weather is normally just beautiful. (Note, that's also a bit of a problem, as we're in the midst of the worst drought in recorded history. But then, that also means lots of cloud-free days.)
I'm an American who has consistently found better opportunities to do better work with better folks than I could ever find in the US. It's not perfect - nor would any Australian every say that Australia is - but Aussies do know how good they have it here. And if you come to have a look about, you'll see how good it is...
For most phones from most providers, there are techniques available (Google for them) which allow you to re-flash your phone with firmware which is not completely locked up by the carrier. The manufacturer provides a full suite of features, then builds custom firmware for each carrier, basically subtracting features from the overall set.
I encountered this problem with SonyEricsson phones (first a K700, now K750), which were Vodafone branded, and wouldn't play the custom MP3 files I'd created to use as ringtones. I reflashed the phones, and voila, they play. Vodafone doesn't lock down the OS, however, so whatever J2ME programs I write I can install and use on my phone.
I think you may want to take a look at a new carrier.
Interesting point. A good point. And I point I _did_ make in "Piracy is Good?"
If the bugs become annoying, they'll be removed. The goal, then, is to provide what people want in an easy-to-digest manner. And that means advertising becomes more subtle - if it continues to exist.
If advertising fails, then there are going to need to be new economic models to fund entertainment production. You could argue (and I have) that amateur content is going to drive out professional content. Google Video is probably in the vanguard on that, along with YouTube and Yahoo! Video. In a year's time they may present a real alternative to professional production. We'll see.
HBO didn't start poisoning torrents with "Rome". It started with season 5 of "Six Feet Under". I live in Australia, where SFU is shown - eventually - on free-to-air television, but it's shown months after my friends watch it in the US, so I tend to grab the episodes off the torrent as they're shown on HBO. With the beginning of series 5, I noted that I was getting 2x the hash errors than I was receiving good chunks. I knew that it must be HBO "poisoning" the torrent.
Whether it's good or bad, it's certainly within their capabilities to do so. The danger for HBO is that it is forcing BT clients to evolve in interesting ways to avoid this kind of manipulation. SafePeer anyone?
The raw, honest truth is that anything that is broadcast - via airwaves or cable - is up for grabs. HBO doesn't yet understand that the real money is to be made in licensing - DVDs, soundtracks, decorative "Rome" wall hangings, what have you. That's where they'll need to earn back the $100M they spent on the series, because it's growing increasingly impossible to force people to watch something through a proscribed channel once it has been broadcast through _any_ channel.
Home entertainment hasn't been around for fifty years - it really only began after the Betamax decision in 1984. You are correct there, and apparently in violent agreement with what I was saying.
The thirty years from the collapse of the studio system through to the birth of home entertainment were a period when the studios were sold, re-sold, went bankrupt, and so on, because they had such a difficult time earning their money back - and when they did, it was generally only through TV licenses to run their movies. Not from the box office.
Box office receipts do not begin to cover the cost of making movies. Not even close. You generally need to earn at least 2.5x the movie's cost before it will turn into profit. Now, in the age of home entertainment, that's not spectacularly hard to do. But before the VCR, it was nearly impossible.
Licensing includes the payment of a license fee by the studio's own home entertainment division, by a subscription cable channel, by a broadcast TV network, in addition to product tie-ins, character licensing, etc. It's not all just character licensing, but if you take a look at the highest-grossing motion pictures, you will see that many of them have character licenses built in - LOTR, anyone?
And George Lucas didn't invent character licensing. Walt Disney did, fifty years earlier.
I don't know who you are, AC, but this is a reposted comment. I've read this at least once before on/., and that was months ago. Which means you're either lying or, at the very least, covering the facts up quite a bit.
The truth of the matter is that the theatrical release of movies is (and has been, for fifty years) a money-losing proposition. Home entertainment is where the studios make some of their money, with the rest coming from licensing. As the marginal cost of entertainment distribution approaches zero, the studios will be forced to give their movies away, if only to ensure that they can make money from licensing. You can't download a t-shirt.
This is a bad idea because it turns people *into* livestock. And all the bovine hordes will simply be tagged because Big Daddy Gummint sez it'll protect them from them thar "terrorist" types.
Christ, cattle in the stockyards -- and who's the scapegoat?
There's been some studies in the US (sorry, no link) which show that folks will actually watch feature-length films on their phones. Until recently this was thought to be entirely ridiculous. Now, with a 4GB drive and some nice MPEG4 encoding, I could conceivably get 100 hours (!) of video content onto my mobile. (MPEG4, well compressed, uses about 40MB per hour of audiovisual content.) That's really something - more amazing than having 600-or-so songs on my mobile... And that's going to lead to some interesting content being developed for this platform... TiVo on your mobile, anyone?
One of the most overlooked aspects of digital cinema is the freedom it offers exhibitors (theatre owners) to repurpose their exhibition space (seats) on-the-fly. Instead of needing several copies of the latest-and-greatest Hollywood blockbuster on opening day in the megaplex, they can have one digital copy and ship that to however many projectors (and theatres) they need to show it in, for as long as the demand holds up.
But, perhaps even more significantly, it allows theatre owners to show "little" films, which might only fill up seats once a week, without having to hold onto expensive prints of those films.
Before the mid-1970s ("Jaws", specifically), films were rolled out to theatres in a gradual release. But, after "Jaws" and "Star Wars", Hollywood required thousands of prints for thousands of theatres on the film's release date. That fact alone has contributed to the ever-increasing trend toward blockbuster films to the exclusion of all else - they sucked resources from other more experimental projects, and kept the theatres fully loaded with movies that the exhibitors were more-or-less obliged to show.
Now the exhibitor can keep a very wide range of films on hand, and show them as demand develops. Films might stay in release for an entire year (or at least until the DVD comes out) because of digital cinema, and "little" films could potentially reach much wider audiences as a result.
And that's not even counting the fact that a digital cinema doesn't have to show movies. It could (and probably would) show various HD broadcasts, such as the Superbowl, the Academy Awards, and other specialty programming. A digital cinema is a brand new beast, and exhibitors will find a lot of uses for these very expensive, but flexible machines.
Although no one in the exhibition industry really likes to admit it, the average 35 mm print of the average film showing in the average theatre an average number of times has a resolution considerably less than the theoretical maximum. If you assume perfect printing from a perfect negative shown for the first time in a perfect projector, you might get something near to these values, but -- in most cases -- the actual resolution is much closer to one-third of that value. This is because every time the film is exposed to the mechanical stresses of projection, and is exposed to a bright light source - which bleaches the film stock - it loses clarity and resolution. Cinematographers know this, and they hate it, but, until now, they couldn't do anything about it. Although, at the moment, the maxiumum resolution of digital cinema is less than the theoretical maximum of analog cinema, in practice the digital image is nearly always cleaner, clearer and higher-resolution.
I was one of the big fans of Brittanica when it went online - it was a great thing and sorely needed. But Brittanica, in their infinite wisdom, couldn't figure out how to make a vastly popular website pay for itself. (Perhaps they should have asked Google.) So it went behind a subscription-based wall, thus creating the need for Wikipedia: our appetites had been whetted, and we weren't going to roll over and fork out $5/month, because, hey, information wants to be free, right?
So now we have a commercial encyclopedia, and an open-source encyclopedia. Both are online. Only one of them has an article on relativity written by Einstein. (Hint: it ain't Wikipedia.) And now they get to duke it out in the all-too-fickle hearts and minds of the billion users of the net.
To quote an old saw: Brittanica is a fine institution - but who wants to be in an institution? Libraries, certainly, they're already institutionalized. But for the casual user, Wikipedia is nearly always more accessible. And in the age of infinite media choice, accessiblity always triumphs reliability.
Wikipedia may not be perfect, but it is far more complete (particularly on anything to do with CS) than Brittanica could ever afford to be. Brittanica will likely always be more accurate than Wikipedia could ever hope to be.
This isn't an either/or situation; it's a world of and-and-and. It's good to have both; Wikipedia will try to live up to Britannica's standards of quality, and Britannica will try to live up to Wikipedia's openness, flexibility and breadth.
A single-eye system will produce eyestrain, but I don't know that it will necessarily produce binocular dysphoria. I doubt any studies have been done on this - and quite probably, they should be. Although VR is all fun and games, it's quite closely coupled to our biology, and that makes it very potent.
I agree wholeheartedly, and I think something like that is not far away. It'll probably end up being a three-step process:
1) Broadcast the program - in all international markets - on the same date, everywhere. This means you won't have downloading between and early-air market and a later-air markets. (As is the case often between the USA and Australia, which is per capita the king of TV downloading for just this reason.)
2) Release the program on the torrent, with commercials.
3) Release an HD DVD of the series, with lots of special features.
This is actually a win for the networks, because they get an extra chance for revenues. They lose the repeat market (which is substantial, don't get me wrong) but they'll make up for at least some of it by selling adds into the downloadable version.
If the networks adopt this approach, they'll make it through the age of filesharing in a way the record companies seem unable to. We'll see if they're flexible enough, or if they'll go down in flames fighting P2P.
As someone else who was very intrigued by Battlestar Galactica, I resorted to BitTorrent to download the mini - which didn't air in Sydney until _last_ week (over a year after airing in the US), and got even more excited waiting for the series. (I've seen the whole season, and it's well worthwhile.)
All I can say is that the television networks have well and truly lost control over their choke-hold on distribution. Air a program _anywhere_ in the world and it's instantaneously available _everywhere_ in the world. Which means either a) all showings of all series will take place on the same date all around the world; or b) piracy is going to drive the television business out of business, broadcast flag or no. (In Australia we don't have broadcast flags. Yet. Nor do they have them in the UK.)
The economic pressure of filesharing broadcast TV is going to force the national networks to coordinate their offerings across the world - mark my words...
Display size: NTSC analog broadcast is _essentially_ 320x240 resolution, so it's not really all that bad. Yeah, it sucks for FarCry, but for a scroller - and, in 1993, there were _only_ side scrollers on the consoles - it's more than adequate.
The tracking issue: I am _positive_ that an EyeToy or iSight could be used as the basis as a very potent tracking system. (I saw demos at SECA research a few years ago which essentially proved this point.) It can be done now, in R/T. I would imagine this is a good use of the PS3's Cell chip.:-)
The HMD issue: a unary focal plane is not a good thing to use for long periods of time - it makes your eyes weak, because the cornea isn't getting its regular exercise. And any long term use of an HMD produces eyestrain, stereo or not, high-resolution or low. It's a fundamental problem in the design (Robinett, 1992).
CNG is available in the vast majority of service stations. It blew me away when I first got here - being an American, I had no idea it was in widespread use.
Good points: - It's a lot cheaper than gasoline, about.40 AUD per liter vs. 1 AUD for gasoline (and Australia has some of the lower gas prices in the world) - A liter of CNG gets you (just about) as far as a liter of gasoline - It's less polluting
Most of the Sydney-area taxis use CNG for precisely this reason. The one person I know who owns a CNG-fueled automobile for personal use has a brother-in-law who owns a taxi company, so he got a stock vehicle, and had it painted (Sydney taxis are white)... He loves it.
Slashdot Mirror
This *is* one of the signs of the Apocalypse, right?
Funnily enough, Lynx was one of the first apps I installed on my jailbroken iPhone 3g. Works like a charm. :-)
Wow. I haven't read such a misogynist comment on Slashdot since...um...maybe... ever?
Repeating the slanders - and justifying them - is just, well, it's wrong. It's bad behavior. And it's not to the point of the original post. It's what's known as an 'ad hominem' attack.
And somehow this got modded to '5 - Insightful'. Which means there are a few other people out there who are clearly just as misogynist. That's even more disturbing, because had I points today, this would have been modded down to '-1 - Troll'.
Please, please try to be kind. Someday you might be a celebrity, yourself.
Don't forget that there are non-trivial support costs associated with any laptop, even one as durable as XO.
Odd. I'm running Java 6 on OSX. It is available - in beta - but it's most certainly available.
Seems to work just fine.
Please do not confuse a free market with an anti-market. Something that is as highly controlled (rightly or wrongly) as the radio spectrum doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of being a free market. This is, in fact, nearly the textbook definition of an anti-market, where economic entities collude with governments to retain market control.
If you want real free markets, then you don't regulate at all. No spectrum allocations, no power regulations, nothing. Of course, that's chaos. So what do we do? We use governmental institutions to balance the needs of all stakeholders. And Skype is quite definitely a stakeholder in this area.
Everyone, everywhere, needs more competition; that's not just a good idea, it's a Natural Law. Eventually, the telcos will learn this.
As someone who just received Permanent Residency visa status in Australia, I can tell you why to come here: the people, and the weather. The people are marvelously laid-back, happy, engaging and - for the most part - very open minded. The weather is normally just beautiful. (Note, that's also a bit of a problem, as we're in the midst of the worst drought in recorded history. But then, that also means lots of cloud-free days.)
I'm an American who has consistently found better opportunities to do better work with better folks than I could ever find in the US. It's not perfect - nor would any Australian every say that Australia is - but Aussies do know how good they have it here. And if you come to have a look about, you'll see how good it is...
"Piracy is Good?" - the name of the presentation given at the Australian Film Television and Radio School is also up for download on Google Video at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-172006821 1869162779&q=Piracy+is+Good
For most phones from most providers, there are techniques available (Google for them) which allow you to re-flash your phone with firmware which is not completely locked up by the carrier. The manufacturer provides a full suite of features, then builds custom firmware for each carrier, basically subtracting features from the overall set.
I encountered this problem with SonyEricsson phones (first a K700, now K750), which were Vodafone branded, and wouldn't play the custom MP3 files I'd created to use as ringtones. I reflashed the phones, and voila, they play. Vodafone doesn't lock down the OS, however, so whatever J2ME programs I write I can install and use on my phone.
I think you may want to take a look at a new carrier.
Interesting point. A good point. And I point I _did_ make in "Piracy is Good?"
If the bugs become annoying, they'll be removed. The goal, then, is to provide what people want in an easy-to-digest manner. And that means advertising becomes more subtle - if it continues to exist.
If advertising fails, then there are going to need to be new economic models to fund entertainment production. You could argue (and I have) that amateur content is going to drive out professional content. Google Video is probably in the vanguard on that, along with YouTube and Yahoo! Video. In a year's time they may present a real alternative to professional production. We'll see.
HBO didn't start poisoning torrents with "Rome". It started with season 5 of "Six Feet Under". I live in Australia, where SFU is shown - eventually - on free-to-air television, but it's shown months after my friends watch it in the US, so I tend to grab the episodes off the torrent as they're shown on HBO. With the beginning of series 5, I noted that I was getting 2x the hash errors than I was receiving good chunks. I knew that it must be HBO "poisoning" the torrent.
Whether it's good or bad, it's certainly within their capabilities to do so. The danger for HBO is that it is forcing BT clients to evolve in interesting ways to avoid this kind of manipulation. SafePeer anyone?
The raw, honest truth is that anything that is broadcast - via airwaves or cable - is up for grabs. HBO doesn't yet understand that the real money is to be made in licensing - DVDs, soundtracks, decorative "Rome" wall hangings, what have you. That's where they'll need to earn back the $100M they spent on the series, because it's growing increasingly impossible to force people to watch something through a proscribed channel once it has been broadcast through _any_ channel.
Home entertainment hasn't been around for fifty years - it really only began after the Betamax decision in 1984. You are correct there, and apparently in violent agreement with what I was saying.
The thirty years from the collapse of the studio system through to the birth of home entertainment were a period when the studios were sold, re-sold, went bankrupt, and so on, because they had such a difficult time earning their money back - and when they did, it was generally only through TV licenses to run their movies. Not from the box office.
Box office receipts do not begin to cover the cost of making movies. Not even close. You generally need to earn at least 2.5x the movie's cost before it will turn into profit. Now, in the age of home entertainment, that's not spectacularly hard to do. But before the VCR, it was nearly impossible.
Licensing includes the payment of a license fee by the studio's own home entertainment division, by a subscription cable channel, by a broadcast TV network, in addition to product tie-ins, character licensing, etc. It's not all just character licensing, but if you take a look at the highest-grossing motion pictures, you will see that many of them have character licenses built in - LOTR, anyone?
And George Lucas didn't invent character licensing. Walt Disney did, fifty years earlier.
I don't know who you are, AC, but this is a reposted comment. I've read this at least once before on /., and that was months ago. Which means you're either lying or, at the very least, covering the facts up quite a bit.
The truth of the matter is that the theatrical release of movies is (and has been, for fifty years) a money-losing proposition. Home entertainment is where the studios make some of their money, with the rest coming from licensing. As the marginal cost of entertainment distribution approaches zero, the studios will be forced to give their movies away, if only to ensure that they can make money from licensing. You can't download a t-shirt.
This is a bad idea because it turns people *into* livestock. And all the bovine hordes will simply be tagged because Big Daddy Gummint sez it'll protect them from them thar "terrorist" types.
Christ, cattle in the stockyards -- and who's the scapegoat?
There's been some studies in the US (sorry, no link) which show that folks will actually watch feature-length films on their phones. Until recently this was thought to be entirely ridiculous. Now, with a 4GB drive and some nice MPEG4 encoding, I could conceivably get 100 hours (!) of video content onto my mobile. (MPEG4, well compressed, uses about 40MB per hour of audiovisual content.) That's really something - more amazing than having 600-or-so songs on my mobile... And that's going to lead to some interesting content being developed for this platform... TiVo on your mobile, anyone?
One of the most overlooked aspects of digital cinema is the freedom it offers exhibitors (theatre owners) to repurpose their exhibition space (seats) on-the-fly. Instead of needing several copies of the latest-and-greatest Hollywood blockbuster on opening day in the megaplex, they can have one digital copy and ship that to however many projectors (and theatres) they need to show it in, for as long as the demand holds up.
But, perhaps even more significantly, it allows theatre owners to show "little" films, which might only fill up seats once a week, without having to hold onto expensive prints of those films.
Before the mid-1970s ("Jaws", specifically), films were rolled out to theatres in a gradual release. But, after "Jaws" and "Star Wars", Hollywood required thousands of prints for thousands of theatres on the film's release date. That fact alone has contributed to the ever-increasing trend toward blockbuster films to the exclusion of all else - they sucked resources from other more experimental projects, and kept the theatres fully loaded with movies that the exhibitors were more-or-less obliged to show.
Now the exhibitor can keep a very wide range of films on hand, and show them as demand develops. Films might stay in release for an entire year (or at least until the DVD comes out) because of digital cinema, and "little" films could potentially reach much wider audiences as a result.
And that's not even counting the fact that a digital cinema doesn't have to show movies. It could (and probably would) show various HD broadcasts, such as the Superbowl, the Academy Awards, and other specialty programming. A digital cinema is a brand new beast, and exhibitors will find a lot of uses for these very expensive, but flexible machines.
Although no one in the exhibition industry really likes to admit it, the average 35 mm print of the average film showing in the average theatre an average number of times has a resolution considerably less than the theoretical maximum. If you assume perfect printing from a perfect negative shown for the first time in a perfect projector, you might get something near to these values, but -- in most cases -- the actual resolution is much closer to one-third of that value. This is because every time the film is exposed to the mechanical stresses of projection, and is exposed to a bright light source - which bleaches the film stock - it loses clarity and resolution. Cinematographers know this, and they hate it, but, until now, they couldn't do anything about it. Although, at the moment, the maxiumum resolution of digital cinema is less than the theoretical maximum of analog cinema, in practice the digital image is nearly always cleaner, clearer and higher-resolution.
1. Battlestar Galactica gets huge ratings (and downloads)
2. Battlestar Galactica is sci-fi
3. B5 is sci-fi
4. B5 will get high ratings (attendance)
Or did I do my math wrong here?
I was one of the big fans of Brittanica when it went online - it was a great thing and sorely needed. But Brittanica, in their infinite wisdom, couldn't figure out how to make a vastly popular website pay for itself. (Perhaps they should have asked Google.) So it went behind a subscription-based wall, thus creating the need for Wikipedia: our appetites had been whetted, and we weren't going to roll over and fork out $5/month, because, hey, information wants to be free, right?
So now we have a commercial encyclopedia, and an open-source encyclopedia. Both are online. Only one of them has an article on relativity written by Einstein. (Hint: it ain't Wikipedia.) And now they get to duke it out in the all-too-fickle hearts and minds of the billion users of the net.
To quote an old saw: Brittanica is a fine institution - but who wants to be in an institution? Libraries, certainly, they're already institutionalized. But for the casual user, Wikipedia is nearly always more accessible. And in the age of infinite media choice, accessiblity always triumphs reliability.
Wikipedia may not be perfect, but it is far more complete (particularly on anything to do with CS) than Brittanica could ever afford to be. Brittanica will likely always be more accurate than Wikipedia could ever hope to be.
This isn't an either/or situation; it's a world of and-and-and. It's good to have both; Wikipedia will try to live up to Britannica's standards of quality, and Britannica will try to live up to Wikipedia's openness, flexibility and breadth.
And that's a good thing.
Ah, thanks for the correction. CNG didn't seem right.
A single-eye system will produce eyestrain, but I don't know that it will necessarily produce binocular dysphoria. I doubt any studies have been done on this - and quite probably, they should be. Although VR is all fun and games, it's quite closely coupled to our biology, and that makes it very potent.
I agree wholeheartedly, and I think something like that is not far away. It'll probably end up being a three-step process:
1) Broadcast the program - in all international markets - on the same date, everywhere. This means you won't have downloading between and early-air market and a later-air markets. (As is the case often between the USA and Australia, which is per capita the king of TV downloading for just this reason.)
2) Release the program on the torrent, with commercials.
3) Release an HD DVD of the series, with lots of special features.
This is actually a win for the networks, because they get an extra chance for revenues. They lose the repeat market (which is substantial, don't get me wrong) but they'll make up for at least some of it by selling adds into the downloadable version.
If the networks adopt this approach, they'll make it through the age of filesharing in a way the record companies seem unable to. We'll see if they're flexible enough, or if they'll go down in flames fighting P2P.
As someone else who was very intrigued by Battlestar Galactica, I resorted to BitTorrent to download the mini - which didn't air in Sydney until _last_ week (over a year after airing in the US), and got even more excited waiting for the series. (I've seen the whole season, and it's well worthwhile.)
All I can say is that the television networks have well and truly lost control over their choke-hold on distribution. Air a program _anywhere_ in the world and it's instantaneously available _everywhere_ in the world. Which means either a) all showings of all series will take place on the same date all around the world; or b) piracy is going to drive the television business out of business, broadcast flag or no. (In Australia we don't have broadcast flags. Yet. Nor do they have them in the UK.)
The economic pressure of filesharing broadcast TV is going to force the national networks to coordinate their offerings across the world - mark my words...
Display size: NTSC analog broadcast is _essentially_ 320x240 resolution, so it's not really all that bad. Yeah, it sucks for FarCry, but for a scroller - and, in 1993, there were _only_ side scrollers on the consoles - it's more than adequate.
:-)
The tracking issue: I am _positive_ that an EyeToy or iSight could be used as the basis as a very potent tracking system. (I saw demos at SECA research a few years ago which essentially proved this point.) It can be done now, in R/T. I would imagine this is a good use of the PS3's Cell chip.
The HMD issue: a unary focal plane is not a good thing to use for long periods of time - it makes your eyes weak, because the cornea isn't getting its regular exercise. And any long term use of an HMD produces eyestrain, stereo or not, high-resolution or low. It's a fundamental problem in the design (Robinett, 1992).
CNG is available in the vast majority of service stations. It blew me away when I first got here - being an American, I had no idea it was in widespread use.
.40 AUD per liter vs. 1 AUD for gasoline (and Australia has some of the lower gas prices in the world)
Good points:
- It's a lot cheaper than gasoline, about
- A liter of CNG gets you (just about) as far as a liter of gasoline
- It's less polluting
Most of the Sydney-area taxis use CNG for precisely this reason. The one person I know who owns a CNG-fueled automobile for personal use has a brother-in-law who owns a taxi company, so he got a stock vehicle, and had it painted (Sydney taxis are white)... He loves it.