Sounds great at first, and it is good having the flexibility of hours, but believe me, working from home isn't all it is cut out for. Working from your mum's house is an open invitation to "just take a five minute break to fix..." several times a day. You will be distracted by telemarketing calls, friends and family expect you can just drop what you are doing to help out with things,(because you can just catch up later, rlight?) and you don't have that nice delineation between the start and end of your working day. If you do start working from home, make sure you establish right from the start that between 9:00 to 5:00 (your hours may vary) you are strictly at work and should be treated as such. Mostly though, I miss working in a team environment and having people to bounce ideas off, and being able to get home and not think about work. After working from home for 5 years, I can't wait to get back into a regular office environment.
Small arms are definitely up there with weapons of mass destruction.. If you want to kill off a lot of civilians in a country, just flood the place with cheap guns/ammo, and the population will do it to themselves. look at the death rate in the US from guns (31224 in 2007 in a population of aprox 300 M compared to say, the UK.(47 in 2007, in a population of 60M)
South Africa is by far the worst though, at about 71 deaths per 100000 per year, with that country flooded with illegal guns. How many did that most successful (or at any rate the most notorious) terrorist attack 9/11 kill? just under 3000?
I'm not saying you shouldn't have a right to have arms, but the social cost definitely has to be weighed up and should be put into perspective. Likewise, the social changes put in place to prevent damage to society from terrorist attacks should be commensurate with social changes put in place to prevent damage from other threats like lax gun control, unsafe vehicles and roads, lack of affordable medical access, and unhealthy food - all of which kill a hell of a lot of people each year.
As soon as the leader of one war weary group wanted to build his new residence on top of the same hill as the leader of another war weary group, there would be new potential for conflict and much shaking of pointy sticks. Eventually someone might even throw one of those sticks, and then where would we be?
Until there is a way to deal with assholes whose solution to resolving conflict is to convince their followers to go beat up on some other asshole's followers, there will always be war at one scale or another. Unfortunately we seem to have a predisposition to listening to assholes and letting them lead us.
I'd like to see a society where all conflicts are resolved with the leaders out first on the front lines. I am sure there would be much greater tendency for them to talk and resolve issues peacefully instead of with pointy sticks/bullets/nukes.
If there is no actual design of how to do it, isn't this just an idea, which shouldn't be patent-able? Otherwise I could just get a patent on a full 3d head mounted display with 120 degrees field of view and 4k pixel resolution per eye at 120fps in a form factor that looks like a cool pair of sunglasses, with full head tracking. Sure, it's what I wish existed, and I can definitely imagine it and even make pretty drawings showing the purported field of view and stylish sunglasses look, but that is a long way off from being able to actually make it, or even designing the optics to give that sort of wide field of view in a small form factor
(Currently best you can get is 1080p and about 45 degree field of view per eye, and looks more like a star trek prop than a pair of sunglasses.)
If you want to get that liver transplant, the surgeon isn't going ot do it for free. The hospital isn't going to provide your bed for free.
There is a huge shortage of donors. Direct selling of organs would lead to all sorts of abuses, and should never be allowed, but at the moment there are simply too few people who elect to be donors. If there was an annual amount paid to people with donor status on their licence, (which you could of course elect to drop from year to year) and that amount went up and down according to the needed supply (ie. if there are enough donors, the yearly amount paid to donors drops) then it would encourage a lot more people to be donors. In addition, if you DO have donor status and have been for a few years, then need an organ yourself, you should get either priority or at least your organ transplant costs reduced (which should also in turn reduce the cost of your medical insurance).
Even if it worked out to costing a few thousand dollars on average for an organ under this scheme, it would still be a small fraction of the total transplant cost, which
Of course all the same rules should still apply for donors as it does now - have to be really truly dead, given all attempts at resuscitation etc before your liver is given to someone else!
At a claimed cost of 628,000,000,000 and supposedly being able to house 100,000, it's a bargain too - only 6280 per person. Here in Aus, housing costs somewhere between 50,000 to about 100,000 per person for housing. (Roughly 100000 per bedroom room for a house, on average.)
I think the head positioning and input could be both dealt with by the same way - have a head mounted camera too (ideally it would be part of the glasses). in a static environment ( say, a room or something) it should be possible to capture and triangulate fixed features in the room, and calculate your head position from them. you might have to go through some kind of calibration step if tracking feattures like wall edges or obkects that are an unknown distance and size, or you could use printed reference marks that are of a known size that you could place in your environment. I have seen some pretty effective position tracking of things with markers on them using OpenVL, to track a patterned marker on a cap, but if you turned this around and triangulated the camera's position from a fixed feature or two in a room, you would know the camera position/orientation and hence the head position.
Your hands within the same field of view could then be tracked and used for input - to make it easier for the system you could wear some kind of patterned gloves, like this http://people.csail.mit.edu/rywang/handtracking/ to type on a virtual keyboard. Downside: it's going to probably take a lot more more CPU than you have available on an arduino or something lightweight like that.
A lot of apps simply can't be threaded that well. Even games, with all their graphical snd sound goodness can't use multiple cores that effectively. you will have one heavy thread which is doing all the graphics, you can throw AI on to one or two threads, put sound on another and UI on another, plus networking and other IO could be on additiona threads, but the graphics thread will be the really heavy one, and the rest will be very lightweight in comparison. You can't break the graphics thread out to multiple threads because your 3d video card's graphics context has to be handled by the same thread.
Oops. Stuffed the screen size for the above mentioned glasses - they are actually 1920x1080, not 1600x1920. Got it mixed up with my laptop's 'almost hdtv' display resolution...
Instead of a projector, i'd suggest a head mounted display.
these guys http://www.siliconmicrodisplay.com/st1080-features.html have finally answered my question of 3 years ago: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/05/19/1734244/where-are-the-high-res-head-mounted-displays and come up with a wearable display that is lightweight, uses 7 watts, and most importantly is apparently true 1600x1080p x 2 (ie stereo view) in a package that only looks slightly dorky instead of the full face brick / helmet thing that had been the only option before that for this kind of resolution. with 10% transparency option, you can still see through it enough to see that virtual keyboard and your surroundings. With adjustable inter pupil distance (IPD) you can set it up so it's right for your eye spacing, thus eliminating one of the major problems with earlier displays that made them hard to wear (ie. migrane inducing) for any length of time. Apparent screen size is equivalent to 100 inch screen at 10 feet, with a 45 degree field of view.
It's still a bit pricey at $800, but definitely competitive with say, a big 3d tv and shutter glasses, and a lot easier on your neck to wear attached to your face.
It's got true 3d display, 1920x1080 stereo (ie. 3d) vision, which is supposedly equivalent to 100 inch display at 10 feet, with inter ocular distance adjustable, so it should be wearable for long periods. 10% transparency so you don walk into telegraph poles while using it on the move, and 7 watts powe usage so shouldn't need too much weight worth of batteries. I'm not a customer yet, but after submitting this post http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/05/19/1734244/where-are-the-high-res-head-mounted-displays a few years ago, seems like someone finally listened to me:)
Be sure to post whatever solution you decide on - I'd be very interested to see what you come up with. (input I guess is the next thing to solve)
I'm sick of all the bloody money the Government blows on royal commissions and investigation of this sort. They generate hugely expensive, massive documents that no one reads or really gives a damn about in the end, and are basically a way for politicians to say "hey we are doing something about it" without actually doing anything about it.
At the end of the day, who really gives a shit if your wifi connection has been tagged and a bit of data sniffed? if you care that much about it, secure it properly in the first place, reduce your signal strength so you don't overspill your boundary too much, or just run wired instead.
I am glad that this commissioner has seen that another investigation is the complete waste of time it really is - and has instead focused on getting the right laws in place (which they now are). Google admitted wrong, apologised, smacked down the engineer responsible, and paid the fine. End of story.
There are many famous people who were reportedly sickly children - who survived because of healthcare available at the time. If they had not been supported by the technology avaialble at the time, society would have been the poorer for it - and arguably, humanity would not have advanced to the point it is today.
I myself was born 14 weeks prematurely, and would certainly have been doomed even 50 years ago. I have yet to make any earth shattering contributions to humanity, but I certainly don't count myself as an evolutionary failure - I am reasonably fit and have solid abilities in working with technology - though 500 years ago being good in electronics and software development would have been an entirely useless skill.
To talk of "de- evolving" because we have been able to keep people alive through technology is nonsensical - as long as you are fit enough to reproduce (with or without assistance) you are by definition meeting the criteria to be fit enough to survive, given the current environment.
Of course there would have been many more who were too busy just getting enough to eat or find a handy cave to live in, if it weren't for technology too, and they too would have been unable to survive without technology.
How many berry bushes are there to eat around you, and how many nice caves do you know you could move into (and beat all the other people who also wanted to use these same resources) if you had to compete for shelter and food without technology?
I like this - if a patent holding company does actually produce a token product to get around this new rule, and only sell a small small number of units, then that shows what the patent is worth, too.
One of the most objectionable things with patents is that even if you do accept that you are using patented technology, the licencing fees seem to be way out of proportion to the value of the patent. If you were to actually take any typical program that you develop apart line by line and identify all the patents it infringes, then go and seek licencing for each of those patents, I am sure the end price would be many many more times what the software could ever be sold for.
cut my own post off short... Continuing... if your country can't afford to administer these sort of basic tests for free as part of the health services that ultimately protect the whole population, you have to question what's the point of spending billions on trying to build surveillance networks and military defences against theoretical reds/terrorists/whatever, but completely ignoring the medical front line of defence against those little buggers (viruses and contagious diseases) that can just as easily decimate your population if unchecked.
I admit, I don't like going to get tested - it's a bit embarassing and can be inconvenient - but it's a lot better than not knowing, and of course means you and your new partner can have complete peace of mind.
Nailed it. Here in Aus, you can get STI checks free, and they actually encourage you to get one every time you change partners. Not just for AIDS, but for Hepatitis and a couple of other more common diseases I think . This also means there is a better chance of tracking down your partners and stopping whatever diseases you might have getting spread further. It also means if you do have a life threatening disease, you can get counselling to help you deal with this traumatic news and help stop you totally flipping out.
Overall it helps the community, because it prevents the further spread of disease, which would otherwise cost a lot more in the long term.
Having a test you do at home for this sort of life threatening disease, instead of getting a professionally administered one with appropriate counselling backup is the stupidest thing I ever heard of. If your coun
I think that in order to appease the "think of the children" crowd, an artist's children should be able to collect royalty payments too - but once the children are adults, or a little older - perhaps 21 to go with the traditional age of maturity, the artist's works should go into the public domain. If the artist laves a spouse, it would probably fair to allow the spouse to collect payments along with the children as long as they are looking after children too, but really, just as a doctor or lawyer's spouse has to find new means of financial support following their partner's death, so should the spouse of any intellectual property owner.(Including programmers like myself)
The children are thus thought of, and once they are adults are now seriously motivated to emulate their parent's success - after all, just bring brought up in the household of a successful artist should have endowed the children with some degree of connections and hopefully even talent and training to launch their own musical careers if they so chose. Either that or they can get a regular job, just like the rest of us.
Oh, and R.I.P Whitney. you really did have a magnificent voice. I can only hope your daughter Bobbi Kristina inherited some of that talent and is motivated enough to do something with it too once she recovers from this awful loss. I wish you all the best in your future - just make something of it.
I think an appropriate punishment would be for the copyer to have to copy the software another 10 times - but this time, by hand, by writing all those 1's and 0's out by hand on a big, big pice of paper. Do that a few times and mabey the'll lose interest in copying.
If you are lifting your front wheel then you are doing it wrong. Both wheels are supposed to be on the ground at all times. If my friend had followed this simple rule, he'd still be around today instead of having gone under a bus.
I propose an alternative - make paedophilia punishable by a bullet to the head, and leave our privacy alone! I'm sick of the "think of the children" excuse being used as an excuse to strip more and more rights away, and increase state surveylance. If it wasn't for paedophiles, they wouldn't have this excuse. I think my proposal solved the problem neatly.
My main point is that the god-damned things are flakey and unreliable due to their complexity compared to a memory stick. Perhaps it's the laser that dies, perhaps it's the mechanical parts going out of alignment - perhaps it's just dust building up on the optics - I don't really care, I just know that CD/DVD players just generally suck - and not just PC ones. I have had several stand-alone DVD players die too, as well as a few old school boom boxes that work fine except for the broken CD player. (ie. tape, radio amp and speakers work)
In comparison, there's relatively little to go wrong with a USB port / memory stick.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds great at first, and it is good having the flexibility of hours, but believe me, working from home isn't all it is cut out for. Working from your mum's house is an open invitation to "just take a five minute break to fix ..." several times a day.
You will be distracted by telemarketing calls, friends and family expect you can just drop what you are doing to help out with things,(because you can just catch up later, rlight?) and you don't have that nice delineation between the start and end of your working day.
If you do start working from home, make sure you establish right from the start that between 9:00 to 5:00 (your hours may vary) you are strictly at work and should be treated as such.
Mostly though, I miss working in a team environment and having people to bounce ideas off, and being able to get home and not think about work.
After working from home for 5 years, I can't wait to get back into a regular office environment.
Some of the best moments in science have started with "Hmm, that's funny..." I wonder what this one will lead to.
Small arms are definitely up there with weapons of mass destruction.. If you want to kill off a lot of civilians in a country, just flood the place with cheap guns/ammo, and the population will do it to themselves. .(47 in 2007, in a population of 60M)
look at the death rate in the US from guns (31224 in 2007 in a population of aprox 300 M compared to say, the UK
South Africa is by far the worst though, at about 71 deaths per 100000 per year, with that country flooded with illegal guns.
How many did that most successful (or at any rate the most notorious) terrorist attack 9/11 kill? just under 3000?
I'm not saying you shouldn't have a right to have arms, but the social cost definitely has to be weighed up and should be put into perspective.
Likewise, the social changes put in place to prevent damage to society from terrorist attacks should be commensurate with social changes put in place to prevent damage from other threats like lax gun control, unsafe vehicles and roads, lack of affordable medical access, and unhealthy food - all of which kill a hell of a lot of people each year.
As soon as the leader of one war weary group wanted to build his new residence on top of the same hill as the leader of another war weary group, there would be new potential for conflict and much shaking of pointy sticks. Eventually someone might even throw one of those sticks, and then where would we be?
Until there is a way to deal with assholes whose solution to resolving conflict is to convince their followers to go beat up on some other asshole's followers, there will always be war at one scale or another.
Unfortunately we seem to have a predisposition to listening to assholes and letting them lead us.
I'd like to see a society where all conflicts are resolved with the leaders out first on the front lines. I am sure there would be much greater tendency for them to talk and resolve issues peacefully instead of with pointy sticks/bullets/nukes.
If there is no actual design of how to do it, isn't this just an idea, which shouldn't be patent-able?
Otherwise I could just get a patent on a full 3d head mounted display with 120 degrees field of view and 4k pixel resolution per eye at 120fps in a form factor that looks like a cool pair of sunglasses, with full head tracking. Sure, it's what I wish existed, and I can definitely imagine it and even make pretty drawings showing the purported field of view and stylish sunglasses look, but that is a long way off from being able to actually make it, or even designing the optics to give that sort of wide field of view in a small form factor
(Currently best you can get is 1080p and about 45 degree field of view per eye, and looks more like a star trek prop than a pair of sunglasses.)
A lot of people are afraid of becoming homeless bums and getting hit by a car?
I'd say that under the current medical system in the US, he's no longer worth saving once it is established that he can't pay his bill.
In other countries, with a well funded public medical system, he'd probably get a lot longer run.
If you want to get that liver transplant, the surgeon isn't going ot do it for free.
The hospital isn't going to provide your bed for free.
There is a huge shortage of donors.
Direct selling of organs would lead to all sorts of abuses, and should never be allowed, but at the moment there are simply too few people who elect to be donors.
If there was an annual amount paid to people with donor status on their licence, (which you could of course elect to drop from year to year) and that amount went up and down according to the needed supply (ie. if there are enough donors, the yearly amount paid to donors drops) then it would encourage a lot more people to be donors. In addition, if you DO have donor status and have been for a few years, then need an organ yourself, you should get either priority or at least your organ transplant costs reduced (which should also in turn reduce the cost of your medical insurance).
Even if it worked out to costing a few thousand dollars on average for an organ under this scheme, it would still be a small fraction of the total transplant cost, which
Of course all the same rules should still apply for donors as it does now - have to be really truly dead, given all attempts at resuscitation etc before your liver is given to someone else!
At a claimed cost of 628,000,000,000 and supposedly being able to house 100,000, it's a bargain too - only 6280 per person. Here in Aus, housing costs somewhere between 50,000 to about 100,000 per person for housing. (Roughly 100000 per bedroom room for a house, on average.)
I think the head positioning and input could be both dealt with by the same way - have a head mounted camera too (ideally it would be part of the glasses).
in a static environment ( say, a room or something) it should be possible to capture and triangulate fixed features in the room, and calculate your head position from them. you might have to go through some kind of calibration step if tracking feattures like wall edges or obkects that are an unknown distance and size, or you could use printed reference marks that are of a known size that you could place in your environment. I have seen some pretty effective position tracking of things with markers on them using OpenVL, to track a patterned marker on a cap, but if you turned this around and triangulated the camera's position from a fixed feature or two in a room, you would know the camera position/orientation and hence the head position.
Your hands within the same field of view could then be tracked and used for input - to make it easier for the system you could wear some kind of patterned gloves, like this http://people.csail.mit.edu/rywang/handtracking/ to type on a virtual keyboard. Downside: it's going to probably take a lot more more CPU than you have available on an arduino or something lightweight like that.
A lot of apps simply can't be threaded that well.
Even games, with all their graphical snd sound goodness can't use multiple cores that effectively.
you will have one heavy thread which is doing all the graphics, you can throw AI on to one or two threads, put sound on another and UI on another, plus networking and other IO could be on additiona threads, but the graphics thread will be the really heavy one, and the rest will be very lightweight in comparison. You can't break the graphics thread out to multiple threads because your 3d video card's graphics context has to be handled by the same thread.
Oops. Stuffed the screen size for the above mentioned glasses - they are actually 1920x1080, not 1600x1920. Got it mixed up with my laptop's 'almost hdtv' display resolution...
Instead of a projector, i'd suggest a head mounted display.
these guys http://www.siliconmicrodisplay.com/st1080-features.html have finally answered my question of 3 years ago:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/05/19/1734244/where-are-the-high-res-head-mounted-displays
and come up with a wearable display that is lightweight, uses 7 watts, and most importantly is apparently true 1600x1080p x 2 (ie stereo view) in a package that only looks slightly dorky instead of the full face brick / helmet thing that had been the only option before that for this kind of resolution.
with 10% transparency option, you can still see through it enough to see that virtual keyboard and your surroundings.
With adjustable inter pupil distance (IPD) you can set it up so it's right for your eye spacing, thus eliminating one of the major problems with earlier displays that made them hard to wear (ie. migrane inducing) for any length of time.
Apparent screen size is equivalent to 100 inch screen at 10 feet, with a 45 degree field of view.
It's still a bit pricey at $800, but definitely competitive with say, a big 3d tv and shutter glasses, and a lot easier on your neck to wear attached to your face.
There is finally a true 1080p head mounted display option http://www.siliconmicrodisplay.com/st10801.html I'd consider instead of a projector.
It's got true 3d display, 1920x1080 stereo (ie. 3d) vision, which is supposedly equivalent to 100 inch display at 10 feet, with inter ocular distance adjustable, so it should be wearable for long periods. 10% transparency so you don walk into telegraph poles while using it on the move, and 7 watts powe usage so shouldn't need too much weight worth of batteries. :)
I'm not a customer yet, but after submitting this post http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/05/19/1734244/where-are-the-high-res-head-mounted-displays a few years ago, seems like someone finally listened to me
Be sure to post whatever solution you decide on - I'd be very interested to see what you come up with. (input I guess is the next thing to solve)
I'm sick of all the bloody money the Government blows on royal commissions and investigation of this sort.
They generate hugely expensive, massive documents that no one reads or really gives a damn about in the end, and are basically a way for politicians to say "hey we are doing something about it" without actually doing anything about it.
At the end of the day, who really gives a shit if your wifi connection has been tagged and a bit of data sniffed? if you care that much about it, secure it properly in the first place, reduce your signal strength so you don't overspill your boundary too much, or just run wired instead.
I am glad that this commissioner has seen that another investigation is the complete waste of time it really is - and has instead focused on getting the right laws in place (which they now are). Google admitted wrong, apologised, smacked down the engineer responsible, and paid the fine. End of story.
Can we move on now?
There are many famous people who were reportedly sickly children - who survived because of healthcare available at the time.
If they had not been supported by the technology avaialble at the time, society would have been the poorer for it - and arguably, humanity would not have advanced to the point it is today.
I myself was born 14 weeks prematurely, and would certainly have been doomed even 50 years ago. I have yet to make any earth shattering contributions to humanity, but I certainly don't count myself as an evolutionary failure - I am reasonably fit and have solid abilities in working with technology - though 500 years ago being good in electronics and software development would have been an entirely useless skill.
To talk of "de- evolving" because we have been able to keep people alive through technology is nonsensical - as long as you are fit enough to reproduce (with or without assistance) you are by definition meeting the criteria to be fit enough to survive, given the current environment.
Of course there would have been many more who were too busy just getting enough to eat or find a handy cave to live in, if it weren't for technology too, and they too would have been unable to survive without technology.
How many berry bushes are there to eat around you, and how many nice caves do you know you could move into (and beat all the other people who also wanted to use these same resources) if you had to compete for shelter and food without technology?
I like this - if a patent holding company does actually produce a token product to get around this new rule, and only sell a small small number of units, then that shows what the patent is worth, too.
One of the most objectionable things with patents is that even if you do accept that you are using patented technology, the licencing fees seem to be way out of proportion to the value of the patent. If you were to actually take any typical program that you develop apart line by line and identify all the patents it infringes, then go and seek licencing for each of those patents, I am sure the end price would be many many more times what the software could ever be sold for.
They are still acting as radiators (albeit not very good ones), or the OP wouldn't have a problem in the first place.
cut my own post off short... Continuing...
if your country can't afford to administer these sort of basic tests for free as part of the health services that ultimately protect the whole population, you have to question what's the point of spending billions on trying to build surveillance networks and military defences against theoretical reds/terrorists/whatever, but completely ignoring the medical front line of defence against those little buggers (viruses and contagious diseases) that can just as easily decimate your population if unchecked.
I admit, I don't like going to get tested - it's a bit embarassing and can be inconvenient - but it's a lot better than not knowing, and of course means you and your new partner can have complete peace of mind.
Nailed it.
Here in Aus, you can get STI checks free, and they actually encourage you to get one every time you change partners. Not just for AIDS, but for Hepatitis and a couple of other more common diseases I think .
This also means there is a better chance of tracking down your partners and stopping whatever diseases you might have getting spread further. It also means if you do have a life threatening disease, you can get counselling to help you deal with this traumatic news and help stop you totally flipping out.
Overall it helps the community, because it prevents the further spread of disease, which would otherwise cost a lot more in the long term.
Having a test you do at home for this sort of life threatening disease, instead of getting a professionally administered one with appropriate counselling backup is the stupidest thing I ever heard of. If your coun
I think that in order to appease the "think of the children" crowd, an artist's children should be able to collect royalty payments too - but once the children are adults, or a little older - perhaps 21 to go with the traditional age of maturity, the artist's works should go into the public domain. If the artist laves a spouse, it would probably fair to allow the spouse to collect payments along with the children as long as they are looking after children too, but really, just as a doctor or lawyer's spouse has to find new means of financial support following their partner's death, so should the spouse of any intellectual property owner.(Including programmers like myself)
The children are thus thought of, and once they are adults are now seriously motivated to emulate their parent's success - after all, just bring brought up in the household of a successful artist should have endowed the children with some degree of connections and hopefully even talent and training to launch their own musical careers if they so chose. Either that or they can get a regular job, just like the rest of us.
Oh, and R.I.P Whitney. you really did have a magnificent voice. I can only hope your daughter Bobbi Kristina inherited some of that talent and is motivated enough to do something with it too once she recovers from this awful loss. I wish you all the best in your future - just make something of it.
I think an appropriate punishment would be for the copyer to have to copy the software another 10 times - but this time, by hand, by writing all those 1's and 0's out by hand on a big, big pice of paper.
Do that a few times and mabey the'll lose interest in copying.
If you are lifting your front wheel then you are doing it wrong. Both wheels are supposed to be on the ground at all times. If my friend had followed this simple rule, he'd still be around today instead of having gone under a bus.
I propose an alternative - make paedophilia punishable by a bullet to the head, and leave our privacy alone! I'm sick of the "think of the children" excuse being used as an excuse to strip more and more rights away, and increase state surveylance. If it wasn't for paedophiles, they wouldn't have this excuse. I think my proposal solved the problem neatly.
My main point is that the god-damned things are flakey and unreliable due to their complexity compared to a memory stick. Perhaps it's the laser that dies, perhaps it's the mechanical parts going out of alignment - perhaps it's just dust building up on the optics - I don't really care, I just know that CD/DVD players just generally suck - and not just PC ones. I have had several stand-alone DVD players die too, as well as a few old school boom boxes that work fine except for the broken CD player. (ie. tape, radio amp and speakers work)
In comparison, there's relatively little to go wrong with a USB port / memory stick.
I think it's more to do the optics going out of alignment or something like that, which is why it starts failing on DVDs first.