Why do desal? Reuse the water that is coming from the waste water treatment plants. Instead of dumping that in the river to flow out ot sea put it through a second plant and return it to the reservoir. You solve your water problems and you solve the problem of nitrogen rich water flowing into the ocean.
Desals have to combat the corrosion problems you get from dealing with salt. Much easier to deal with non-salt water.
The concept of a Desal plant in CA has been abandoned because of the community push back. Instead recycled water plants are being built instead to treat effluent and return it to the reservoirs.
There are also cheaper and easier to run than desal plants and honestly make the most sense.
But this is what I am trying to get at. The teachings of Jesus in the bible are great. However the organised religion that is Christianity, in its many forms, does not only push the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament.
Religion and the books that are its foundations are able to be twisted to pursue the goals of whoever is doing the twisting. When I referenced Leviticus it was to show that the Old Testament is used by people all the time to justify actions under Christianity. The fact that that doesn't sit with what you think Christianity should be, just based on the New Testament, doesn't change that people will use which ever part of the bible they want to support their position and call it Christianity.
I would also add to this that people in power are nothing if not pragmatic. Iran is working hard at modernising its economy and increasing the standard of living of its people. Unfortunately for it it ended up on the wrong side of an argument with the US. The US then went on to support its bitterest rival in the form of Iraq for a long time and, then when that went bad, the two Iraq invasions destabilised the region.
If I was running Iran I would want as modern a military as I could manage and I would want to have as advanced an economy as possible.
The problem with nukes in Iran is not so much whether they are pursuing building a bomb or not. It is more about the fact that they want complete internal power security. Iran has no coal but lots of oil, it makes sense to build nuclear power stations to free up more oil for export. The problem with the deals being offered to Iran so far have been that they cannot have a full internal nuclear fuel cycle. It has always been that someone would supply them with the fuel and given Iran has seen the winds of support and geo-politics change dramatically in their region can you blame them for saying no thanks
It wasn't that long ago that Saddam was the poster child of the West. Even more recently Assad. Both of those two did some dodgy things but their western support disappeared overnight and there is no way you would build your economy around something that could be taken away on a whim.
Given I have a large number of friends who are Iranian (there are a lot of Iranian migrants in Australia) I would say that it is the actions of a smaller nation that is being pressured by a much larger one. Iran is one of the few reasons ISIS has failed to over-run Syria and hence a larger section of the middle-east.
So why is Leviticus used as the reason homosexuals are bad?
While I agree with you that the New Testament is much nicer than the Old they seem to be taken as a combined "Word of God" and lots of groups pull sections they want for the goal they want.
Probably every 3 months or so. But I will be honest and say that that is because of my wife rather than me. She is the photo / memory nut.
It has ended up being one of those things we do of an evening every now and again. Get the albums out and a bottle of wine. I also have all my camcorders loaded into XBMC so they get a run pretty often as well.
Damn just went and looked that up. I have an old version installed on my linux machine and didn't know they had deprecated the linux version. That sucks.
You cannot remain a member of a club unless you do the minimum number of shoots and you cannot own pistols without being a member of the club.
Given the shoots have to be at a competition level the clubs records the scores anyway and so at the end of March they have to supply a list of all members marked with those who comply with the clubs requirements and what they shot. It is all electronic and tied to your license no. so it will flag it straight away if you fall short. When you go in for your shoot you sign in to the book with your range pass and licenses number. Complete your shoot, record your score and have it signed by the range officer.
So I guess requirements fall back on the club to a large degree. Also people accept the laws here and are generally happy to work to comply. We are actually seeing a big increase in the number of sporting shooters at the moment, enough that a couple of full scale ranges are being constructed to meet demand.
Weapons licensing is also handled directly by the police. All weapon sales are registered and you are only allowed to sell weapons via a licensed broker. So even private sales between individuals are tracked via a broker.
I think the biggest problem instituting something like this in the states is the sheer quantity of weapons floating around (leaving out the rabid pro gun stance). I have seen photos of people collections where they have 50+ weapons. There is no real way you could own that amount here as you wouldn't be able to comply with the competition requirements.
For rifles hunting as a sport is another acceptable option. To do that you need to have a letter from someone who owns a compliant property to own the weapon AND be a member of SSAA (Sporting Shooters Association Australia). Rifles don't require minimum shoots. Pistols are not permitted when hunting.
The core Islamic faith does not promote violence. It is co-opted to do so. There are a load of sections of the bible which when taken out of context sound like they promote violence. The Koran is the same.
“When you approach a city to fight against it, you shall offer it terms of peace. If it agrees to make peace with you and opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall become your forced labor and shall serve you. However, if it does not make peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. When the LORD your God gives it into your hand, you shall strike all the men in it with the edge of the sword. Only the women and the children and the animals and all that is in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourself; and you shall use the spoil of your enemies which the LORD your God has given you. Only in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes” (Deuteronomy 20:10-17)
Taken out of context I could easily use this to show that the Christian god has told me to invade other cities and only leave them alive if they become my slaves. The biggest difference is that currently Christian dominated countries tend to make up the wealthier and more educated parts of the world (and this has nothing to do with Christianity it was just a fluke of history). People who are educated, comfortable and happy are less likely to want to kill other people. Simple proof is that no nation states that have a McDonalds have yet been to war with each other (and by that I mean a true war not supporting insurgents aka Ukraine).
If the people recruited into these organisations were happy, well fed, safe and educated we wouldn't be seeing this problem. But their infrastructure is destroyed, their life expectancy is low, their education is non-existent but they have access to arms and a finger pointed at the west that it is the wests fault that they are poor and miserable. Unfortunately in a lot of cases they have a good argument for that.
Only fully automatics and semi-automatics are banned here. That is a good thing because this tool walked into a cafe with a shotgun, not an AK47. At worst it's a double barrel sawn off
Just to clarify this as it is a little more fine grained that an outright ban. To own a semi-automatic rifle you need to be in a career which requires it. So culling from a helicopter is one of the few occupations which allows you to own a semi-auto rifle. Semi-auto pistols though are a standard item in IPSC and ISSF competitions so you are able to own them without a problem but the size of the magazine is restricted to 10 shots. There is however no restriction on the number of mags you carry (odd I know).
Pistol ownership also requires you to actually use the weapons rather than just say that you do. So if you own just 1 pistol you must do a minimum of 6 competitive shoots with that weapon each year. If you own 2 or more you must do a minimum of 4 with each. I own a.22 semi an air and a.32 semi so I need to do a minimum of 12 competition shoots per year.
Fully automatic rifles or pistols are outright banned. As are self-loading and pump action shotguns.
To which I answer the same degree that I am concerned that the leader of the largest sections of Islam will do. Zero.
The degree to which I fear that splinter section of the Christian faith will take up arms against Islam is about on the same level as my concern of splinter Islamic groups taking up arms against the west. Christian extremists are the ones that will fire bomb paediatrician offices remember. I would not want to be of Islamic faith in America at the moment because I think even walking down the street could put you at risk.
What degree of risk would you associate with the KKK, a predominately Christian organisation, may start targetting muslins? I would say it is non-zero.
exiftool is an opensource perl library. You can do everything Image Tagger does on the command line with exiftool. Image tagger however does all the hard work of building the commands for you.
You can easily obtain a firearm in Australia. In fact I own multiple. The thing is you have to be licensed and have a valid reason for owning one, and self defence is not a valid reason. You need to be a member of a club, pass a police check and have some character references. Then you need to wait a year after getting your license. It's a bit of a pain in the arse but it is far from impossible.
I own multiple semi-automatic pistols for competition shoots and a bolt action rifle for bench rest shooting.
Whether you agree with the gun laws in Australia, and as a shooter I do, to say they are near impossible to own is complete crap. What I would say is that Australia is a very safe place to live and your chances of getting shot here is almost zero. You don't ever hear about kids getting shot cause the knocked on the wrong house door during Halloween.
Both are religions that base their entire structure around "we are the one true correct path and all others are wrong". Both have been used to dominate other populations.
That said religion is just a tool to control the masses. It is no different to other ideologies in that case.
Rubbish. One of the things I can say about the Islamic organisations here is that they have worked very hard to prevent radicalisation of their communities. There have been numerous times they have been on TV here showing how their faith and their interpretation of the koran does not fit with the actions of the extremists.
And as for being more or less supported by the Koran the Christian Bible can be used to push what ever you want as well. It's hardly like it is a particularly peaceful document.
What I find terrifying is how quickly supposedly intelligent people descend into clumping massive groups of people together and scream terrorist. If all Muslims were part of terrorist organisations or it was particularly main stream we would be involved in WW3 right now. But we aren't.
But SOOOOO slow and painful to do it this way! You will be tagging to the end of time with a right click multi menu approach.
Use something like image tagger or one of the other dedicated applications which allows you to add data to the exif tags without the pain of using explorer.
What is the planned obsolescence with Picasa? And how would they enforce it? JPG isn't going anywhere anytime soon and I don't see a shift to a brand new format that picasa doesn't support happening.
Also it runs on all platforms with minimal dependencies. picasa
Depends: libc6
Depends: libasound2
liboss4-salsa-asound2
Depends: zlib1g
Depends: gconf2
Depends: libfreetype6
Even if picasa was abandoned you can still used it. The software I use for bulk renaming images and transferring off memory cards, pixfer, has been abandoned for years. Still works great.
If it is a static composition then I agree with you. ie if I have arranged something for a photoshoot and I am simply moving between exposure levels etc then pick the best and move on. But most of the multi-exposures I am talking about are trying to catch a photo of a child running around or something similar.
As I have also said I run two separate collections. One is that you have described, pick the best pic. The other is an exhaustive collection of everything ever taken. I guess I don't see any reason to delete the source material. I would take the same approach if I was making a movie. I might shoot 20hrs of footage to have a 15 minute clip at the end. I'm still going to keep the 20hrs of footage. I may never ever ever look at it again. But I would rather invest the negligible cost of storage on the off chance I might.
It's easy to transfer to a new machine. The problem is being able to access it from multiple machines at once. ie My machine and my wife's machine can't access the database together.
As for lock-in - it is a stand alone application with no activation or licensing requirements. It works on windows, mac & linux. JPEG is the standard and unlikely to change. Tags in picassa can be saved to the exif data so there is no lockin there. The lockin comes in that picasa does face recognition which for me is THE killer part of picasa. Find me all the photos with x in it is brilliant.
Because why delete them? It's not like the storage is expensive and I have learned that what you want to see in photos changes over time. And by crap I mean, daughter pulling a stupid face, or slightly blurry, or taken just after the event I wanted to capture. They still contain a memory. They just aren't what I would put on the wall.
Also the duplicates are not identical, they are all slightly different, just separated by less than a second. Google+ does cool things with those. I was rather commenting on the OPs decision to keep 1 delete the rest.
As for your process, it is more involved than what I do. Mine is, plug in memory card, click transfer. Files are now renamed and in the right place. It is also done almost exclusively by my wife who takes a gazillion photos a day of our kids. I think the big difference is you are talking about photos taken on a trip. We would take 10+ photos every day.
As for picking 1 photo that captures the moment I do something similar, the difference is I choose the photo I want, copy it out and leave the complete collection untouched. I currently have 95839 digital photos with the first being take 26/1/2004
Jpeg has been the standard for years now, I doubt very much that it will become inaccessible anytime soon. And the best thing about digitised photos is the don't degrade like the physical versions. Proprietary mail storage files are not really comparable.
The other nice thing about digital is that all it takes is a codec to read something. I don't need to dig out the old vcr etc.
As for the old home videos, I made the concious decision about 5 years ago to transfer all of them to digital for exactly the reasons you outlined. So I spent days going through all mine and my parents videos and captured them on a pc. I also worked with my dad to scan every single photo and slide that he had. It took us 2 years and we went through 4 scanners in the process but they are now done. We also worked through them naming and dating them as best we could.
And finally why would I have a reader for my first digital camera? I don't even own it anymore and I can't even remember what type of cards it took (I think it was CF). I have transferred them onto my NAS and will have reused the card multiple times. They're not like film canisters.....
In the end there is no guarantee that my system will be readable in x years time. But using common standards, such as jpeg, and LTO tapes to back them up mean chances are they will be for someone who cares enough to look. In addition I print the yearly summary that exist in the physical world and requires no special interface to use.
If you want to create a best of album to pass on to your kids then by all mean to that. But don't trash the rest! Storage is cheap so there is no reason you shouldn't keep everything. One of the best finds I ever had from my great grandparents was a suitcase full of old photos taken around the turn of the century. Most of them were of random life, and even though I didn't know who the people were it was a fascinating insight into how they lived. It was only 110 years ago but I found the differences incredible and much more relatable in photo form then in a book.
I have just over 60gb of digital photos now. Many of them are crap. Another chunk are essentially duplicates where I have taken 20 photos to capture a moment. What we do is put together a highlights book for each year. We actually print them using a company that makes coffee book style books. It's a lot of work, sifting through the images, editing and cropping them and then finally putting them together in a 40-60 page book. But it is so worth it. We now have 13 of these books and we will start on 2014 shortly.
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Why do desal? Reuse the water that is coming from the waste water treatment plants. Instead of dumping that in the river to flow out ot sea put it through a second plant and return it to the reservoir. You solve your water problems and you solve the problem of nitrogen rich water flowing into the ocean.
Desals have to combat the corrosion problems you get from dealing with salt. Much easier to deal with non-salt water.
The concept of a Desal plant in CA has been abandoned because of the community push back. Instead recycled water plants are being built instead to treat effluent and return it to the reservoirs.
There are also cheaper and easier to run than desal plants and honestly make the most sense.
But this is what I am trying to get at. The teachings of Jesus in the bible are great. However the organised religion that is Christianity, in its many forms, does not only push the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament.
Religion and the books that are its foundations are able to be twisted to pursue the goals of whoever is doing the twisting. When I referenced Leviticus it was to show that the Old Testament is used by people all the time to justify actions under Christianity. The fact that that doesn't sit with what you think Christianity should be, just based on the New Testament, doesn't change that people will use which ever part of the bible they want to support their position and call it Christianity.
I would also add to this that people in power are nothing if not pragmatic. Iran is working hard at modernising its economy and increasing the standard of living of its people. Unfortunately for it it ended up on the wrong side of an argument with the US. The US then went on to support its bitterest rival in the form of Iraq for a long time and, then when that went bad, the two Iraq invasions destabilised the region.
If I was running Iran I would want as modern a military as I could manage and I would want to have as advanced an economy as possible.
The problem with nukes in Iran is not so much whether they are pursuing building a bomb or not. It is more about the fact that they want complete internal power security. Iran has no coal but lots of oil, it makes sense to build nuclear power stations to free up more oil for export. The problem with the deals being offered to Iran so far have been that they cannot have a full internal nuclear fuel cycle. It has always been that someone would supply them with the fuel and given Iran has seen the winds of support and geo-politics change dramatically in their region can you blame them for saying no thanks
It wasn't that long ago that Saddam was the poster child of the West. Even more recently Assad. Both of those two did some dodgy things but their western support disappeared overnight and there is no way you would build your economy around something that could be taken away on a whim.
the Western world has to ask itself it can tolerate this dangerous ideology to spread within our societies
Please tell me you can see how dangerous a concept this is?
Given I have a large number of friends who are Iranian (there are a lot of Iranian migrants in Australia) I would say that it is the actions of a smaller nation that is being pressured by a much larger one. Iran is one of the few reasons ISIS has failed to over-run Syria and hence a larger section of the middle-east.
So why is Leviticus used as the reason homosexuals are bad?
While I agree with you that the New Testament is much nicer than the Old they seem to be taken as a combined "Word of God" and lots of groups pull sections they want for the goal they want.
Probably every 3 months or so. But I will be honest and say that that is because of my wife rather than me. She is the photo / memory nut.
It has ended up being one of those things we do of an evening every now and again. Get the albums out and a bottle of wine. I also have all my camcorders loaded into XBMC so they get a run pretty often as well.
Really?
Damn just went and looked that up. I have an old version installed on my linux machine and didn't know they had deprecated the linux version. That sucks.
You cannot remain a member of a club unless you do the minimum number of shoots and you cannot own pistols without being a member of the club.
Given the shoots have to be at a competition level the clubs records the scores anyway and so at the end of March they have to supply a list of all members marked with those who comply with the clubs requirements and what they shot. It is all electronic and tied to your license no. so it will flag it straight away if you fall short. When you go in for your shoot you sign in to the book with your range pass and licenses number. Complete your shoot, record your score and have it signed by the range officer.
So I guess requirements fall back on the club to a large degree. Also people accept the laws here and are generally happy to work to comply. We are actually seeing a big increase in the number of sporting shooters at the moment, enough that a couple of full scale ranges are being constructed to meet demand.
Weapons licensing is also handled directly by the police. All weapon sales are registered and you are only allowed to sell weapons via a licensed broker. So even private sales between individuals are tracked via a broker.
I think the biggest problem instituting something like this in the states is the sheer quantity of weapons floating around (leaving out the rabid pro gun stance). I have seen photos of people collections where they have 50+ weapons. There is no real way you could own that amount here as you wouldn't be able to comply with the competition requirements.
For rifles hunting as a sport is another acceptable option. To do that you need to have a letter from someone who owns a compliant property to own the weapon AND be a member of SSAA (Sporting Shooters Association Australia). Rifles don't require minimum shoots. Pistols are not permitted when hunting.
So it is no different to Islam then.
The core Islamic faith does not promote violence. It is co-opted to do so. There are a load of sections of the bible which when taken out of context sound like they promote violence. The Koran is the same.
“When you approach a city to fight against it, you shall offer it terms of peace. If it agrees to make peace with you and opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall become your forced labor and shall serve you. However, if it does not make peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. When the LORD your God gives it into your hand, you shall strike all the men in it with the edge of the sword. Only the women and the children and the animals and all that is in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as booty for yourself; and you shall use the spoil of your enemies which the LORD your God has given you. Only in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes” (Deuteronomy 20:10-17)
Taken out of context I could easily use this to show that the Christian god has told me to invade other cities and only leave them alive if they become my slaves. The biggest difference is that currently Christian dominated countries tend to make up the wealthier and more educated parts of the world (and this has nothing to do with Christianity it was just a fluke of history). People who are educated, comfortable and happy are less likely to want to kill other people. Simple proof is that no nation states that have a McDonalds have yet been to war with each other (and by that I mean a true war not supporting insurgents aka Ukraine).
If the people recruited into these organisations were happy, well fed, safe and educated we wouldn't be seeing this problem. But their infrastructure is destroyed, their life expectancy is low, their education is non-existent but they have access to arms and a finger pointed at the west that it is the wests fault that they are poor and miserable. Unfortunately in a lot of cases they have a good argument for that.
Only fully automatics and semi-automatics are banned here. That is a good thing because this tool walked into a cafe with a shotgun, not an AK47. At worst it's a double barrel sawn off
Just to clarify this as it is a little more fine grained that an outright ban. To own a semi-automatic rifle you need to be in a career which requires it. So culling from a helicopter is one of the few occupations which allows you to own a semi-auto rifle. Semi-auto pistols though are a standard item in IPSC and ISSF competitions so you are able to own them without a problem but the size of the magazine is restricted to 10 shots. There is however no restriction on the number of mags you carry (odd I know).
Pistol ownership also requires you to actually use the weapons rather than just say that you do. So if you own just 1 pistol you must do a minimum of 6 competitive shoots with that weapon each year. If you own 2 or more you must do a minimum of 4 with each. I own a .22 semi an air and a .32 semi so I need to do a minimum of 12 competition shoots per year.
Fully automatic rifles or pistols are outright banned. As are self-loading and pump action shotguns.
To which I answer the same degree that I am concerned that the leader of the largest sections of Islam will do. Zero.
The degree to which I fear that splinter section of the Christian faith will take up arms against Islam is about on the same level as my concern of splinter Islamic groups taking up arms against the west. Christian extremists are the ones that will fire bomb paediatrician offices remember. I would not want to be of Islamic faith in America at the moment because I think even walking down the street could put you at risk.
What degree of risk would you associate with the KKK, a predominately Christian organisation, may start targetting muslins? I would say it is non-zero.
http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/...
exiftool is an opensource perl library. You can do everything Image Tagger does on the command line with exiftool. Image tagger however does all the hard work of building the commands for you.
Of FFS. Please stop spreading your ignorance.
You can easily obtain a firearm in Australia. In fact I own multiple. The thing is you have to be licensed and have a valid reason for owning one, and self defence is not a valid reason. You need to be a member of a club, pass a police check and have some character references. Then you need to wait a year after getting your license. It's a bit of a pain in the arse but it is far from impossible.
I own multiple semi-automatic pistols for competition shoots and a bolt action rifle for bench rest shooting.
Whether you agree with the gun laws in Australia, and as a shooter I do, to say they are near impossible to own is complete crap. What I would say is that Australia is a very safe place to live and your chances of getting shot here is almost zero. You don't ever hear about kids getting shot cause the knocked on the wrong house door during Halloween.
And is EXACTLY the same as Christianity.
Both are religions that base their entire structure around "we are the one true correct path and all others are wrong". Both have been used to dominate other populations.
That said religion is just a tool to control the masses. It is no different to other ideologies in that case.
Rubbish. One of the things I can say about the Islamic organisations here is that they have worked very hard to prevent radicalisation of their communities. There have been numerous times they have been on TV here showing how their faith and their interpretation of the koran does not fit with the actions of the extremists.
And as for being more or less supported by the Koran the Christian Bible can be used to push what ever you want as well. It's hardly like it is a particularly peaceful document.
What I find terrifying is how quickly supposedly intelligent people descend into clumping massive groups of people together and scream terrorist. If all Muslims were part of terrorist organisations or it was particularly main stream we would be involved in WW3 right now. But we aren't.
But SOOOOO slow and painful to do it this way! You will be tagging to the end of time with a right click multi menu approach.
Use something like image tagger or one of the other dedicated applications which allows you to add data to the exif tags without the pain of using explorer.
What is the planned obsolescence with Picasa? And how would they enforce it? JPG isn't going anywhere anytime soon and I don't see a shift to a brand new format that picasa doesn't support happening.
Also it runs on all platforms with minimal dependencies.
picasa
Depends: libc6
Depends: libasound2
liboss4-salsa-asound2
Depends: zlib1g
Depends: gconf2
Depends: libfreetype6
Even if picasa was abandoned you can still used it. The software I use for bulk renaming images and transferring off memory cards, pixfer, has been abandoned for years. Still works great.
Folders combines with picasa for me. /yyyy-mm-dd-Jamaica/yyyy-mm-dd-imgxxx - Me before sunburn.jpg
Picasa gives me xif data and tags.
If it is a static composition then I agree with you. ie if I have arranged something for a photoshoot and I am simply moving between exposure levels etc then pick the best and move on. But most of the multi-exposures I am talking about are trying to catch a photo of a child running around or something similar.
As I have also said I run two separate collections. One is that you have described, pick the best pic. The other is an exhaustive collection of everything ever taken. I guess I don't see any reason to delete the source material. I would take the same approach if I was making a movie. I might shoot 20hrs of footage to have a 15 minute clip at the end. I'm still going to keep the 20hrs of footage. I may never ever ever look at it again. But I would rather invest the negligible cost of storage on the off chance I might.
It's easy to transfer to a new machine. The problem is being able to access it from multiple machines at once. ie My machine and my wife's machine can't access the database together.
As for lock-in - it is a stand alone application with no activation or licensing requirements. It works on windows, mac & linux. JPEG is the standard and unlikely to change. Tags in picassa can be saved to the exif data so there is no lockin there. The lockin comes in that picasa does face recognition which for me is THE killer part of picasa. Find me all the photos with x in it is brilliant.
Because why delete them? It's not like the storage is expensive and I have learned that what you want to see in photos changes over time. And by crap I mean, daughter pulling a stupid face, or slightly blurry, or taken just after the event I wanted to capture. They still contain a memory. They just aren't what I would put on the wall.
Also the duplicates are not identical, they are all slightly different, just separated by less than a second. Google+ does cool things with those. I was rather commenting on the OPs decision to keep 1 delete the rest.
As for your process, it is more involved than what I do. Mine is, plug in memory card, click transfer. Files are now renamed and in the right place. It is also done almost exclusively by my wife who takes a gazillion photos a day of our kids. I think the big difference is you are talking about photos taken on a trip. We would take 10+ photos every day.
As for picking 1 photo that captures the moment I do something similar, the difference is I choose the photo I want, copy it out and leave the complete collection untouched. I currently have 95839 digital photos with the first being take 26/1/2004
Jpeg has been the standard for years now, I doubt very much that it will become inaccessible anytime soon. And the best thing about digitised photos is the don't degrade like the physical versions. Proprietary mail storage files are not really comparable.
The other nice thing about digital is that all it takes is a codec to read something. I don't need to dig out the old vcr etc.
As for the old home videos, I made the concious decision about 5 years ago to transfer all of them to digital for exactly the reasons you outlined. So I spent days going through all mine and my parents videos and captured them on a pc. I also worked with my dad to scan every single photo and slide that he had. It took us 2 years and we went through 4 scanners in the process but they are now done. We also worked through them naming and dating them as best we could.
And finally why would I have a reader for my first digital camera? I don't even own it anymore and I can't even remember what type of cards it took (I think it was CF). I have transferred them onto my NAS and will have reused the card multiple times. They're not like film canisters.....
In the end there is no guarantee that my system will be readable in x years time. But using common standards, such as jpeg, and LTO tapes to back them up mean chances are they will be for someone who cares enough to look. In addition I print the yearly summary that exist in the physical world and requires no special interface to use.
Please GOD don't do this!
If you want to create a best of album to pass on to your kids then by all mean to that. But don't trash the rest! Storage is cheap so there is no reason you shouldn't keep everything. One of the best finds I ever had from my great grandparents was a suitcase full of old photos taken around the turn of the century. Most of them were of random life, and even though I didn't know who the people were it was a fascinating insight into how they lived. It was only 110 years ago but I found the differences incredible and much more relatable in photo form then in a book.
I have just over 60gb of digital photos now. Many of them are crap. Another chunk are essentially duplicates where I have taken 20 photos to capture a moment. What we do is put together a highlights book for each year. We actually print them using a company that makes coffee book style books. It's a lot of work, sifting through the images, editing and cropping them and then finally putting them together in a 40-60 page book. But it is so worth it. We now have 13 of these books and we will start on 2014 shortly.