Heh. I'd thought the same thing. Wonder if his estate can claim royalties off any Cal Tech patents, since he gave a "business method" for such a device, which gives the estate a claim of prior art. I'm going to have to re-read all the other Asimov short stories now for other invention ideas.
Well, for something like that, you want several benchmarks - actual performance per actual watt, effective performance per usable watt, and mean wattage consumed under stress. In other words, what performance will you get per watt of power actually consumed, what performance do you get per watt consumed over idle, and if you really push the processor to do the absolute maximum it is physically capable of (in terms of MIPS, FLOPS and as many other metrics as you care to use) what wattage can you actually get it to consume on average? (Peak usage isn't necessarily useful if it's not sustainable.)
If you can polarize the light, you can have multiple layers distinguished by polarity. Besides, I thought multi-layer systems usually used different frequencies, as optical media work by seeing what reflects and what doesn't. If you add the ability to polarize the light, you can double the number of layers.
Geothermal power is nice, but does have its limits. There are reports suggesting that heavy use of geothermal power can increase the frequency of mini earth tremors, which is probably not good. Also, you are not generally tapping the earth's core (which has plenty of heat) but some local magma reservoir (which has rather less) or a channel through which magma flows (which is not much of a reservoir at all, and could in principle be blocked, which may explain said earlier reports).
In the long term, fusion power is the best solution, but the technology necessary to achieve fusion is taking a painfully long time. I still favour rounding up the fusion scientists, locking them in a building in Alaska with as much money as they can possibly need, and slowly turning down the heat until they quit with the politicking and bitching about whose method is "better" and get something that works.
In the short term, fusion isn't going to happen nearly fast enough to handle the present or any future oil crisis. Geothermal power can. As others have mentioned, other countries use it extensively, such as Iceland and New Zealand. Alaska could probably benefit from it, and the Pacific Northwest is riddled with volcanoes and magma reservoirs. The Pacific Northwest is also a major energy user, making it an ideal place to have major generators.
But also sorta wrong. Such people exist - Myra Hindley was a notorious example. The James Bulger case shows it needn't only be adults. However, the total number of such people probably averages out to one in a hundred million. In comparison, current estimates place the number of domestic sexual child abuse cases at one in every thousand. On the whole, the former - whilst it exists - simply isn't worth putting much time and effort into. Maybe some, but look at the relative payoff. For the same effort, you will prevent and/or solve a lot more actual crime dealing with the latter. Maybe not a hundred thousand times a much, but even if it was ten times as much, that would be an infinitely better use of resources.
According to the UN, slavery in America is still a major plague, and with American attitudes of treating the victims far worse than the abusers, this isn't a problem that's going to go away. Reports that, in some States, police collude with organized crime gangs to facilitate such an evil trade do not bode well. Even if the reports exaggerate, America has had that problem before. That's the sole reason the sole-called "Untouchables" were considered exceptional. Depressing, isn't it, when you have to celebrate when police are doing their job rather than polluting society?
The font system has a lot of benefits (it is defined algorithmically, so if a font is defined correctly, it is completely scalable - it should also mean that a GPU can generate the font on-the-fly from the definition at time of use, rather than need binaries) but lacks some of the capabilities of OpenType (the next-generation TrueType). I would argue that the first step should be to upgrade or replace the metafont system with something that can generate all of the information an OpenType font would need to produce the desired result, without losing any information or capabilities you'd expect in a TeX-style font, with a proof in the form of a metafont compiler that compiled to OpenType fonts with the loss of metafont-specific information only.
This is useful for those of us who find most modern font designers to be difficult to work with. I work with CAD packages just fine, screen layout designers I can use almost blindfold, but font designers are nothing but pain.
LaTeX - or, more correctly, TeX, suffers from the same problem as all markup languages - it is embedded. Old-style desktop publishing packages had this right - they let you design the blocks on the pages, then you put the text onto them. The two were not combined, but kept logically and physically separate. This allows you to massage the layout without tampering with the content. If tags need to be used for this, then let the tagging be automagic and keep the user out of it.
TeX is infinitely more powerful than any modern wordprocessor, but is still nowhere near the power it could be. There's a whole section on why you can't do spiral text, for example, as TeX is line-based. Well, duh. If you support multiple layering, where each layer transforms those within it, you can have text go however you like, because you then have the capacity to map a straight line (for the purpose of one layer) onto any shape you care to define (by means of another layer).
The problem, then, is not the complexity of LaTeX but the lack of suitable abstraction and layering. LaTeX 3 seems to be going nowhere on the official branch, and I've often wondered if it wouldn't be easier if a LaTeX-ng was offered up where you support OpenType generation, OpenType use, abstraction and layering. Four modules. It shouldn't be too difficult to write just four extension modules to the existing code, and then the LaTeX users/developers can figure out which (if any) to keep around. It might even kickstart LaTeX 3.
Gallium is vastly superior to silicon, in much the same way as it is as a semiconductor. Cost is a problem, though If we assume that all superior semiconductors are superior in solar cells, graphene should prove interesting once it matures. At present, solar technology that converts light into heat (solar heaters, solar stoves) are much more efficient than devices that convert light into electricity. Since heating and cooking consume enormous amounts of power, there may be ways to use this type of implementation to reduce the demand for electricity in the first place, rather than to inefficiently provide for that demand. Such methods aren't terribly portable, but neither are houses, restaurants or public baths. So long as you can store the heat without too much loss, reducing demand would seem the most sensible way to solve the energy problem.
In parallel with solar methods for reducing demand, there is the question of energy wastage. I've already mentioned heating water is a big consumer of electricity. The heat required to raise water even one degree celsius is enormous. Most coal, gas and nuclear power stations have staggeringly large cooling towers in which water is converted to steam and released into the atmosphere for that very reason - turning cold water into steam requires a staggering amount of heat, which reduces the temperature of whatever they want to keep cool. Very elegant. Also very wasteful. Rig the cooling towers to a pipe system and you've the biggest, hottest hypocaust ever made. The water is still carrying the heat away, so the towers still work as intended, all you are doing is making that heat available for domestic and industrial use rather than pumping it into the atmosphere.
Spent nuclear fuel also emits significant heat, it would seem more logical to recycle the fuel rods as water heating devices than dump them somewhere and ignore them, although preventing contamination would be extremely hard. Hard is not impossible, however, and it seems better to try and solve a hard problem (and risk succeeding) than to do nothing and face impossible energy demand problems year-after-year.
On the other hand, humans are far more adaptable and can modify plans and experiments in a way no robot yet built could. Sometimes, you have to take the risks. If you want to consider costs, then let's say a robust manned mission costs fifty times as much as a robot mission. If you consider the missions that produced uncertain results (Viking landers and early probe photographs), minimal results (Phoenix) or no results at all (everything that has crashed), you are beginning to approach the cost of a manned mission, where a manned mission could have produced ALL of the useful data so far collected AND much of the data that has been lost due to unexpected conditions and unforeseen circumstances.
Yes, manned missions are extremely risky, and that means a danger of bereavement, but it is better to die with your boots on, making the discoveries of a lifetime, than to live in fear at the back of a cave. Indeed, if we look at places that are most risk-averse, we see that unexpected risks (when they arise) are actually the more dangerous for it. Risk aversity is no healthier than plunging straight into danger without care. Indeed, in a way, it is the same thing, except being risk-averse means you are always plunging into unknown dangers, never known ones. The correct solution is always to be risk-aware, to anticipate and minimize, but never to eliminate, danger. Eliminating danger is probably the most dangerous thing you can ever do.
Any court, indeed anyone who has ever worked in business, knows that nothing in the corporate record is important and that most official records are useless for any purpose beyond keeping the paper and CD manufacturing businesses happy.
I often find I need e-mails that are 10-15 years old. I haven't retained everything over that time, but what I've retained is both interesting and useful. Frivolous emails are certainly deletable. But the non-frivolous stuff? That leaves a lot of stuff whose value does not deprecate with time. In the end, knowledge is its own currency, and those who choose to throw that currency away simply make themselves poorer.
If they're willing to pay twenty million dollars to whoever criticizes the combined company, expect lots of trivial criticisms followed by sudden silence. Frankly, there are very few radio stations worth a damn any more, because of excessive mergers and over-generous media ownership rules. Radio Caroline is still ok, but they've alway been wiling to be different.
Bandwidth is not the same thing as picture quality. An uncompressed image requires more bandwidth than a losslessly-compressed image, even though (since the compression is lossless) the two are identical to the users. As others have noted, standard television had no fixed definition standard. Indeed, many 70s and 80s television productions in the UK mixed film and video in the same program, resulting in wildly-varying standards for sound and picture. (I suggest watching any Blake's 7 episode on YouTube that includes outdoor scenes. Even though that is massacring the image further, you can still tell which scenes were recorded on which medium.)
I -can- see some value in defining minimum standards - new programs recorded with the explicit intent of ending up on HDTV should be recorded at resolutions well in excess of 525 lines (US) or 625 lines (UK). Lossy compression (such as MPEG2) should not be used with a compression so great that artifacts reduce meaningful resolution to 525/625 or less. In the case of pre-HDTV material, that means that you should be on very nearly zero loss. (Ok, old 425 line pictures from the UK are obviously going to be less than that, but those pictures should be interpolated and - if necessary - hand-edited to look as if above the 625 line resolution. Hell, the BBC has not only hand-edited but then hand-colourized as well, so they clearly have the means and the manpower.)
Interpolation has to be done anyway, as the stupid fools didn't use a HDTV resolution that could be divided into any of the pre-existing resolutions (US, UK and Japan all used different resolutions). The sensible HDTV resolution would be the one that required the least interpolation by any - since existing material will dominate for a long time - that also met or exceeded what was desired in an HDTV format (since you want it relatively future-proof). Since, as a rule, you want a higher quality picture rather than a wider camera angle, you might even be better off by having the TV smart enough to merge/interpolate pixels as necessary, and transmit at whatever technology permits, defining resolution as minimum camera angle that can be differentiated by a display.
Yeah, I knew of the military system - I was a contractor for the US navy (SPAWAR) when they first introduced it. Nice idea, but the implementation at the time was lousy. I hope they've improved. You're right that smartcards are superior, especially if a lot of work can be decentralized. Wish they'd be used more. Readers aren't very common (yet). That and the problem of generating strong enough keys are the two main reasons the Mondo smartcard never took off in England as an alternative to credit/debit cards, despite better security and better privacy.
If you install S/KEY or OPIE on your UNIX or Linux box to manage logins, you will be presented with a random challenge string. You then plug that challenge string and your (relatively simple) password into a one-time pad password calculator, which tells you what to type into the login prompt. Voila: An easy-to-remember password that cannot be cracked by simple lookup tables. As close to perfectly secure as you're likely to get (meeting the criteria in the actual question) without being complex for the user.
Post-it notes aren't a bad solution, if the physical area is secure against unauthorized access, so long as the user is aware of the fact that their account is communal within that area. Which, for a private office, isn't a fatal problem. The cleaners are still a potential vulnerability, but the cleaners have far easier access to all of your personal notes, which are likely to have far more valuable information than your account.
For animations such as Toy Story or Finding Nemo, it would theoretically be possible to provide the movie as source and render at the destination. You'd need those Intel 80-core CPUs arranged in a 4-way SMP to get enough horsepower in your television/home studio, but I really can't see any reason besides Intel not having released that yet as to why you couldn't do this. If you render at destination, then you could indeed move the camera anywhere at any time. No different than changing where you sit in an amphitheater for a play, and nobody claims that that changes the intent or purpose of the directors or producers.
I see no easy way of doing this for an actual cinema screen, or for live-action footage. I would personally disregard the whole 3D effort until things like that can be resolved. I'd much prefer efforts to enhance IMAX. 11.1 audio is not the state-of-the-art it once was, and both lenses and film have improved since IMAX was introduced. Besides, IMAX uses a single film spool - keeping three (or indeed N) spools in sync is not that hard, and using a prism to then mix the colours together is a cinch. Just with three tapes, you should be able to double the resolution of the footage. To get the colours absolutely perfect, six tapes would be preferable.
Getting that sort of quality into the multiplexes would be tough, but frankly if they want a gimmick capable of bringing back the really big audience numbers, that would seem to offer more hope than a cheap pair of paper glasses.
Be grateful. Hollywood is looking more and more to 3D films, and that means halving the resolution or framerate (if they use polarized light, which is the only way to get 3D in color without shuttered lenses).
One of the most scarce resources in Africa is water, mostly as a result of deforestation though also as a result of severe damage to infrastructure. Nothing much can be done about infrastructure and reforesting Africa is tough when the level of deforestation is continuing at such a high pace. However, one of the key effects of forests is to reduce reflected radiation. That can be mimicked in ways that would be hard to disrupt, although it wouldn't be easy or cheap. Alternatively, there are ways of artificially inducing thunderstorms. Again, not easy or cheap.
In both of these cases, the west would merely be an initial catalyst. The resource itself (the water) would be under nobody's control. That would solve a key issue. Not the only issue, but certainly one that has blocked the solving of many others.
The blocking of trade would be a disaster for Africa, with two exceptions - any and all wood, and minerals where companies are suspected (or known) to have violated human rights accords or wantonly destroyed the environment. These would be tough to enforce - smuggling is hard enough to stop when the substances involved are always illegal, nevermind when it's selectively illegal. However, the former is needed to prevent the environment decaying past the point of no return (and it's damn close already) and the latter is about the only pressure you can bring without crippling honest trade in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
Dunno, but we now get to discover if fictional characters can sue IBM for patent infringement - assuming Dumbledore remembered to file.
Heh. I'd thought the same thing. Wonder if his estate can claim royalties off any Cal Tech patents, since he gave a "business method" for such a device, which gives the estate a claim of prior art. I'm going to have to re-read all the other Asimov short stories now for other invention ideas.
Hmmm. Is it indoors? Check. Lots of sweating? Check. Potential for heart attacks in unfit people? Check. Ok, it meets the criteria.
Isn't that like muggers suing their victims for having their money in the wrong currency?
OMG!!!!!1! Ponies!!! (Incidentally, I would regard Exmoor ponies to be relatively geeky. However, I'd never be able to smuggle one into my apartment.)
Well, for something like that, you want several benchmarks - actual performance per actual watt, effective performance per usable watt, and mean wattage consumed under stress. In other words, what performance will you get per watt of power actually consumed, what performance do you get per watt consumed over idle, and if you really push the processor to do the absolute maximum it is physically capable of (in terms of MIPS, FLOPS and as many other metrics as you care to use) what wattage can you actually get it to consume on average? (Peak usage isn't necessarily useful if it's not sustainable.)
If you can polarize the light, you can have multiple layers distinguished by polarity. Besides, I thought multi-layer systems usually used different frequencies, as optical media work by seeing what reflects and what doesn't. If you add the ability to polarize the light, you can double the number of layers.
Wrong one. Only TeX' version numbers tend to Pi. LaTeX version numbers have been 1, 2 and 2e. LaTeX 3 exists only in theory.
Geothermal power is nice, but does have its limits. There are reports suggesting that heavy use of geothermal power can increase the frequency of mini earth tremors, which is probably not good. Also, you are not generally tapping the earth's core (which has plenty of heat) but some local magma reservoir (which has rather less) or a channel through which magma flows (which is not much of a reservoir at all, and could in principle be blocked, which may explain said earlier reports).
In the long term, fusion power is the best solution, but the technology necessary to achieve fusion is taking a painfully long time. I still favour rounding up the fusion scientists, locking them in a building in Alaska with as much money as they can possibly need, and slowly turning down the heat until they quit with the politicking and bitching about whose method is "better" and get something that works.
In the short term, fusion isn't going to happen nearly fast enough to handle the present or any future oil crisis. Geothermal power can. As others have mentioned, other countries use it extensively, such as Iceland and New Zealand. Alaska could probably benefit from it, and the Pacific Northwest is riddled with volcanoes and magma reservoirs. The Pacific Northwest is also a major energy user, making it an ideal place to have major generators.
But also sorta wrong. Such people exist - Myra Hindley was a notorious example. The James Bulger case shows it needn't only be adults. However, the total number of such people probably averages out to one in a hundred million. In comparison, current estimates place the number of domestic sexual child abuse cases at one in every thousand. On the whole, the former - whilst it exists - simply isn't worth putting much time and effort into. Maybe some, but look at the relative payoff. For the same effort, you will prevent and/or solve a lot more actual crime dealing with the latter. Maybe not a hundred thousand times a much, but even if it was ten times as much, that would be an infinitely better use of resources.
According to the UN, slavery in America is still a major plague, and with American attitudes of treating the victims far worse than the abusers, this isn't a problem that's going to go away. Reports that, in some States, police collude with organized crime gangs to facilitate such an evil trade do not bode well. Even if the reports exaggerate, America has had that problem before. That's the sole reason the sole-called "Untouchables" were considered exceptional. Depressing, isn't it, when you have to celebrate when police are doing their job rather than polluting society?
The font system has a lot of benefits (it is defined algorithmically, so if a font is defined correctly, it is completely scalable - it should also mean that a GPU can generate the font on-the-fly from the definition at time of use, rather than need binaries) but lacks some of the capabilities of OpenType (the next-generation TrueType). I would argue that the first step should be to upgrade or replace the metafont system with something that can generate all of the information an OpenType font would need to produce the desired result, without losing any information or capabilities you'd expect in a TeX-style font, with a proof in the form of a metafont compiler that compiled to OpenType fonts with the loss of metafont-specific information only.
This is useful for those of us who find most modern font designers to be difficult to work with. I work with CAD packages just fine, screen layout designers I can use almost blindfold, but font designers are nothing but pain.
LaTeX - or, more correctly, TeX, suffers from the same problem as all markup languages - it is embedded. Old-style desktop publishing packages had this right - they let you design the blocks on the pages, then you put the text onto them. The two were not combined, but kept logically and physically separate. This allows you to massage the layout without tampering with the content. If tags need to be used for this, then let the tagging be automagic and keep the user out of it.
TeX is infinitely more powerful than any modern wordprocessor, but is still nowhere near the power it could be. There's a whole section on why you can't do spiral text, for example, as TeX is line-based. Well, duh. If you support multiple layering, where each layer transforms those within it, you can have text go however you like, because you then have the capacity to map a straight line (for the purpose of one layer) onto any shape you care to define (by means of another layer).
The problem, then, is not the complexity of LaTeX but the lack of suitable abstraction and layering. LaTeX 3 seems to be going nowhere on the official branch, and I've often wondered if it wouldn't be easier if a LaTeX-ng was offered up where you support OpenType generation, OpenType use, abstraction and layering. Four modules. It shouldn't be too difficult to write just four extension modules to the existing code, and then the LaTeX users/developers can figure out which (if any) to keep around. It might even kickstart LaTeX 3.
Gallium is vastly superior to silicon, in much the same way as it is as a semiconductor. Cost is a problem, though If we assume that all superior semiconductors are superior in solar cells, graphene should prove interesting once it matures. At present, solar technology that converts light into heat (solar heaters, solar stoves) are much more efficient than devices that convert light into electricity. Since heating and cooking consume enormous amounts of power, there may be ways to use this type of implementation to reduce the demand for electricity in the first place, rather than to inefficiently provide for that demand. Such methods aren't terribly portable, but neither are houses, restaurants or public baths. So long as you can store the heat without too much loss, reducing demand would seem the most sensible way to solve the energy problem.
In parallel with solar methods for reducing demand, there is the question of energy wastage. I've already mentioned heating water is a big consumer of electricity. The heat required to raise water even one degree celsius is enormous. Most coal, gas and nuclear power stations have staggeringly large cooling towers in which water is converted to steam and released into the atmosphere for that very reason - turning cold water into steam requires a staggering amount of heat, which reduces the temperature of whatever they want to keep cool. Very elegant. Also very wasteful. Rig the cooling towers to a pipe system and you've the biggest, hottest hypocaust ever made. The water is still carrying the heat away, so the towers still work as intended, all you are doing is making that heat available for domestic and industrial use rather than pumping it into the atmosphere.
Spent nuclear fuel also emits significant heat, it would seem more logical to recycle the fuel rods as water heating devices than dump them somewhere and ignore them, although preventing contamination would be extremely hard. Hard is not impossible, however, and it seems better to try and solve a hard problem (and risk succeeding) than to do nothing and face impossible energy demand problems year-after-year.
On the other hand, humans are far more adaptable and can modify plans and experiments in a way no robot yet built could. Sometimes, you have to take the risks. If you want to consider costs, then let's say a robust manned mission costs fifty times as much as a robot mission. If you consider the missions that produced uncertain results (Viking landers and early probe photographs), minimal results (Phoenix) or no results at all (everything that has crashed), you are beginning to approach the cost of a manned mission, where a manned mission could have produced ALL of the useful data so far collected AND much of the data that has been lost due to unexpected conditions and unforeseen circumstances.
Yes, manned missions are extremely risky, and that means a danger of bereavement, but it is better to die with your boots on, making the discoveries of a lifetime, than to live in fear at the back of a cave. Indeed, if we look at places that are most risk-averse, we see that unexpected risks (when they arise) are actually the more dangerous for it. Risk aversity is no healthier than plunging straight into danger without care. Indeed, in a way, it is the same thing, except being risk-averse means you are always plunging into unknown dangers, never known ones. The correct solution is always to be risk-aware, to anticipate and minimize, but never to eliminate, danger. Eliminating danger is probably the most dangerous thing you can ever do.
So send a politician.
Mod grandparent unique, given it's slashdot and all.
Any court, indeed anyone who has ever worked in business, knows that nothing in the corporate record is important and that most official records are useless for any purpose beyond keeping the paper and CD manufacturing businesses happy.
I often find I need e-mails that are 10-15 years old. I haven't retained everything over that time, but what I've retained is both interesting and useful. Frivolous emails are certainly deletable. But the non-frivolous stuff? That leaves a lot of stuff whose value does not deprecate with time. In the end, knowledge is its own currency, and those who choose to throw that currency away simply make themselves poorer.
If they're willing to pay twenty million dollars to whoever criticizes the combined company, expect lots of trivial criticisms followed by sudden silence. Frankly, there are very few radio stations worth a damn any more, because of excessive mergers and over-generous media ownership rules. Radio Caroline is still ok, but they've alway been wiling to be different.
Bandwidth is not the same thing as picture quality. An uncompressed image requires more bandwidth than a losslessly-compressed image, even though (since the compression is lossless) the two are identical to the users. As others have noted, standard television had no fixed definition standard. Indeed, many 70s and 80s television productions in the UK mixed film and video in the same program, resulting in wildly-varying standards for sound and picture. (I suggest watching any Blake's 7 episode on YouTube that includes outdoor scenes. Even though that is massacring the image further, you can still tell which scenes were recorded on which medium.)
I -can- see some value in defining minimum standards - new programs recorded with the explicit intent of ending up on HDTV should be recorded at resolutions well in excess of 525 lines (US) or 625 lines (UK). Lossy compression (such as MPEG2) should not be used with a compression so great that artifacts reduce meaningful resolution to 525/625 or less. In the case of pre-HDTV material, that means that you should be on very nearly zero loss. (Ok, old 425 line pictures from the UK are obviously going to be less than that, but those pictures should be interpolated and - if necessary - hand-edited to look as if above the 625 line resolution. Hell, the BBC has not only hand-edited but then hand-colourized as well, so they clearly have the means and the manpower.)
Interpolation has to be done anyway, as the stupid fools didn't use a HDTV resolution that could be divided into any of the pre-existing resolutions (US, UK and Japan all used different resolutions). The sensible HDTV resolution would be the one that required the least interpolation by any - since existing material will dominate for a long time - that also met or exceeded what was desired in an HDTV format (since you want it relatively future-proof). Since, as a rule, you want a higher quality picture rather than a wider camera angle, you might even be better off by having the TV smart enough to merge/interpolate pixels as necessary, and transmit at whatever technology permits, defining resolution as minimum camera angle that can be differentiated by a display.
Yeah, I knew of the military system - I was a contractor for the US navy (SPAWAR) when they first introduced it. Nice idea, but the implementation at the time was lousy. I hope they've improved. You're right that smartcards are superior, especially if a lot of work can be decentralized. Wish they'd be used more. Readers aren't very common (yet). That and the problem of generating strong enough keys are the two main reasons the Mondo smartcard never took off in England as an alternative to credit/debit cards, despite better security and better privacy.
If you install S/KEY or OPIE on your UNIX or Linux box to manage logins, you will be presented with a random challenge string. You then plug that challenge string and your (relatively simple) password into a one-time pad password calculator, which tells you what to type into the login prompt. Voila: An easy-to-remember password that cannot be cracked by simple lookup tables. As close to perfectly secure as you're likely to get (meeting the criteria in the actual question) without being complex for the user.
Post-it notes aren't a bad solution, if the physical area is secure against unauthorized access, so long as the user is aware of the fact that their account is communal within that area. Which, for a private office, isn't a fatal problem. The cleaners are still a potential vulnerability, but the cleaners have far easier access to all of your personal notes, which are likely to have far more valuable information than your account.
For animations such as Toy Story or Finding Nemo, it would theoretically be possible to provide the movie as source and render at the destination. You'd need those Intel 80-core CPUs arranged in a 4-way SMP to get enough horsepower in your television/home studio, but I really can't see any reason besides Intel not having released that yet as to why you couldn't do this. If you render at destination, then you could indeed move the camera anywhere at any time. No different than changing where you sit in an amphitheater for a play, and nobody claims that that changes the intent or purpose of the directors or producers.
I see no easy way of doing this for an actual cinema screen, or for live-action footage. I would personally disregard the whole 3D effort until things like that can be resolved. I'd much prefer efforts to enhance IMAX. 11.1 audio is not the state-of-the-art it once was, and both lenses and film have improved since IMAX was introduced. Besides, IMAX uses a single film spool - keeping three (or indeed N) spools in sync is not that hard, and using a prism to then mix the colours together is a cinch. Just with three tapes, you should be able to double the resolution of the footage. To get the colours absolutely perfect, six tapes would be preferable.
Getting that sort of quality into the multiplexes would be tough, but frankly if they want a gimmick capable of bringing back the really big audience numbers, that would seem to offer more hope than a cheap pair of paper glasses.
Be grateful. Hollywood is looking more and more to 3D films, and that means halving the resolution or framerate (if they use polarized light, which is the only way to get 3D in color without shuttered lenses).
Since the golden ratio is the theoretical ideal for all things visual, a power of e might make more sense.
One of the most scarce resources in Africa is water, mostly as a result of deforestation though also as a result of severe damage to infrastructure. Nothing much can be done about infrastructure and reforesting Africa is tough when the level of deforestation is continuing at such a high pace. However, one of the key effects of forests is to reduce reflected radiation. That can be mimicked in ways that would be hard to disrupt, although it wouldn't be easy or cheap. Alternatively, there are ways of artificially inducing thunderstorms. Again, not easy or cheap.
In both of these cases, the west would merely be an initial catalyst. The resource itself (the water) would be under nobody's control. That would solve a key issue. Not the only issue, but certainly one that has blocked the solving of many others.
The blocking of trade would be a disaster for Africa, with two exceptions - any and all wood, and minerals where companies are suspected (or known) to have violated human rights accords or wantonly destroyed the environment. These would be tough to enforce - smuggling is hard enough to stop when the substances involved are always illegal, nevermind when it's selectively illegal. However, the former is needed to prevent the environment decaying past the point of no return (and it's damn close already) and the latter is about the only pressure you can bring without crippling honest trade in the process.