If I get to work 30 seconds faster, and work 30 seconds later to get home at the "same" time, and I work 270days a year (I do), then I've just added $405 to my gross income, as I happen to bill $90/hr. My commuting mileage runs me about 2100mi/yr, at about 17mpg (Honda Pilot on hills/backroads, I've gotten up to 27 on long trips). That's $210/yr at the current gas prices in my area. By my logic, I'm actually MAKING $195/year just by driving irresponsibly.
Now, I don't really need an SUV, but because of the local climate and conditions, I do need a 4WD/AWD - and most of them get lousy gas mileage, and practically all of them which can seat 5 get lously mileage. I'd be happy paying $6/gallon at the pump if the leadership of this country said "No pertolium products or derivatives whose origin comes from a current or former member of OPEC may be sold in this country." I haven't seen much support for that idea.
My embargo would take care of problem 1, above, which apperas to be your biggest beef. I don't drive faster than the general flow of traffic, and I always use maximum (safe) acceleration when pulling into faster-moving traffic, so I do use some gas-guzzling for safety. Few of us have more money than we would like, but yes, I consciously chose a car and driving style which is less efficient than ideal, though I receive certain trade-off benefits for that choice.
Of course 30 seconds faster isn't much, even if I could justify it in dollars and cents. But every extra minute I get to spend with my baby daughter is - as they say in the Mastercard commercials - priceless. And though I may not be the most important person in the world, she is.
No, it probably isn't - or, rather, you can't make a product Just Like That (TM). If it could be done, it would take a great deal of expensive R&D...just like it did to create the modern drives (whose methods are patented now). That's why there are usually licencing fees that get paid. If the licensing fees are too high, then it will be worth it for you to do the R&D to do it a different way, then undercut the greedy bastards who wouldn't sell you patent rights. Or just wait 'til the patent expires.
You'd better get some flight experience. If you think it's rough competing with lower paid workers on the other side of earth, imagaine how bad it will be when the other planets start providing outsourcing programming.
Does this mean the H1-B visas for aliens will take on new significance?
What is the likelihood that an inventor of the early 20th century would be able to detect an HDTV broadcast stream? It's random, at any real distance it's no stronger than the background radiation, and the apparatus he uses doesn't display moving pictures very well based on even a theortically perfect decoded data stream. Heck - he would be lost given a USB memory key to tinker around with. And that is - as you pointed out - just 100 years of progress.
Heck - they may have spent a thousand years of a large governmental program sending "signals to aliens", just to give up. And that was 600 million years ago.
But, of course, I'll be expecting you to keep Hubble running until your Moon based fantasy^H^H^H^H^H^H^H plan is operational.
It's only advantages over ground based systems (you forgot gravity effects which tend to distort large collectors) happen to be practically insurmountable problems for ground based observations. For example, no matter how good and adaptive a ground based telescope is, there will always be 200 miles of soft-focus fishnet over the lens. Servicing it sucks, but it's still easier than putting a vacuum between a ground based telescope and a star.
And it drives me nuts browsing on "foreign" computers/browsers that don't support them. I only use two gestures (forward and back), and those two alone are worth the price of admission. If I could just make the rest of my programs emulate AutoCAD for pan and zoom I'd be in heaven (I mean, happy, not dead)
For those who don't happen to use ACAD, zoom is the scroll button, with the base point under the cursor, pan is click&drag with the scroll button. Gawd I wish my photo editor would work that way.
Interesting. You've never been to the Bath & Body Works site (http://www.bathandbodyworks.com) which will not let you in unless you're using Flash 6r79 AND IE/NS/Moz of their liking. Not an alternate site, not an email link, not a corporate 800 number.
It'd be nicer if they'd just say:
"YOU DON'T USE WHAT OUR WEB DESIGNER'S USE; GO FSCK YOURSELF"
(I found this out several months ago when they ran a web only promotion, and I couldn't get in to the site. I hate flash, and I use Opera.)
You should start by offering an absolute guarantee of privacy and confidentiality to all of their data, then "update" your terms of service after you've cast your net. It should be changed to alter the phrasing of sentences, adding additional protections for sensitive data, and on page 8 of the 10 page online-only scroll-only updates, mention the removal of "article 5b" (5b being the guarantee of privacy).
You'll offer another two updates, three or four weeks apart with minor changes to more wording, then delete all instances of the original and 1st update terms.
Did I mention that your TOS are compiled dynamically by including an image of partial words, rather than actual text (think of digitally creating a document out of the images you'd get if you confetti shredded a document)? No sense in having and incrimiating Google cache out there, or making it too easy for someone to print them out.
Last time I checked, most folks who were vaccinated for smallpox are no longer immune due the disease, and would hvae to be re-vaccinated. Also, most folks under 30 have never been vaccinated.
How quickly could you be vaccinated, and how long would it take to make you immune? If you were within the effective radius of an aerosol or downwind, would you relly be better off than if you were within the blast radius or fallout zone of a TN warhead? Radiation suits and underground shelters work much more quickly than vaccinations, and fusion bomb damage doesn't spread like a disease (though the local effects are, admittedly, more permanent).
Hundreds of people have already been compensated for the hours they worked on that film. The owners of the IP contained in the film, however, have invested a great deal of money. Reducing the number of people who will pay to see the film reduces the value of their investment. You can argue whether or not you feel bad for a corporation who has invested a hundred million in a film not realizing the maximum potential profit, but don't even think about making this about whether or not the set caterer or one of the special effects computer administrators has been "wronged" by this kid.
I DO think what he did was wrong. He should be fined - probably a nominal amount. Maybe a few hours community service if he's a rich kid, since mommy and daddy probably lose $2500 in their couch cushions on a bad day. If I was still in CA, though, I sure as heck wouldn't want to pay my tax $ to put this prick in jail.
I think the typical bounty is 10%. With potentially hundreds of thousands of copies via P2P:
$7.50/head x 100,000 viewings lost $7.50/head x 150,000 repeat viewings
(you don't just watch it once, do you?) $24.95 x 80,000 DVDs not purchased $39.95 x 30,000 Special Edition DVDs not purchased
(there's always some repeat buyers)
Figure 10% of $5 million (we'll use round numbers) is about $500k in "reasonable" compensation for the buster.
Of course, If I were attorney general, I would seriously have to consider a violation of sales tax laws for this kid. I mean, the state just lost about $420k in sales tax revenue based on the losses suffered by the MPAA. (LA is 8.25%, right? I can't remember anymore)
Would this be like getting tips? Can the Theaters now only pay him $2.01 per hour, since he has another source of income from the patrons of the theater? That would make it even more necessary to collect the reward, and make the employees far more attentive.
Even better, maybe he can be hired on a contract piecework basis, and ONLY get paid when he finds a camcorder. Running of the equipment is a necessary part of his contract, since no movie=no need to have a camcorder.
This could be quite a boon for all of those barley-making-it megaplexes.
(did I forget to open the sarcasm tag? oops, my bad)
I shouldn't have been so hard on space elevators. Anything that requires a cable to get something into orbit would qualify for my ire. (Somebosy at MSFC is bound and determined to put everything in orbit with a cable...it's like a broken record)
No, it's not about technical limits, it's about financial limits. NASA does a lot of continuous research, both alone and with other agencies, such as NOAA. It's all stuff we take for granted now, kind of like sending the shuttle up three or four times a year. It's not sexy anymore just to get to orbit.
The problem is that the "next big thing" costs a lot of money. Think in terms of $1E12 to $3E12. Thats where preliminary Mars Mission estimates hit. Bush announced his plans for the Mars mission, then offered to give them an extra $1E7 to $1E8 over the next ten years to pull it off. I see no less than 3 orders of magnitude shortfall.
Think that number is out of line? Wiki mentions $1E10 as the 1994 cost of Apollo. Though not listed at Wiki, I would expect the Shuttle program cost somewhere in the $1E11 range. Given inflation of both costs and expectations, $1E12 is a good target for the next likely Big Thing.
With the retaliatory action in Afghanistan and the personal vendetta persued in Iraq, along with a not-red-hot-bubble-driven-economy tax base, we're back in the red by $5E11 a year, and still owe $7E12.
NASA doesnt seem to have vision because there's really no money to do a marquis program properly. They're trying to start a high profile program, funded by scraping the sides of the financial pudding bowl. It just isn't going to work. Gee Whiz is expensive - it always has been. Now that we pay for overhead and profit of corporations in addition to the research and development, its even more expensive than it used to be.
NASA hasn't lost it focus, it's been beaten out of them. How much would you expect to spend for the next Hollywood super-blockbuster? I'll give you a budget of $750,000. And I want three films. And amazing special effects - stuff never done before. Throw in a couple of name actors, too - that'll help the marketing. You'd start putting together Blair Witch Project ideas, too, faced with that kind of scenerio.
Of course, if your food/water/air recycling equipment fail/run out before you can get back home, you die.
All of a sudden you have the same problem as you started with, just on a larger scale. sure, they can radio back to earth (assuming they have commnications) and send up a rescue party. Remind me again how long it takes to re-certify the Shuttle to fly after a failure.
Your initial scenerio had two equipment failures (two rovers). My scenerio has two equipment failures (mobile base and shuttle).
Face it, a mobile base makes about as much sense as a space elevator.
And America wouldn't have had a space program. To quote Tom Lehrer's song on WvB's life, "'Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down. That's not my department.' says Werner von Braun"
(If you're too young to have listened to Tom Lehrer, find $30 and go buy his CDs. It's a hilarious view of the world in the 1960s, by a singing mathemetician/professor from MIT. Right up the/. demographic's alley. TL, for those who don't know, is still alive and living in SoCal, but he's got that old man bitterness that spoils the old sarcasm of his songs.)
Huh? You've got fantastic light control in a theater, why would you spend a zillion bux to upgrade your screen and projector tecnology? This is for the high-ambient-light situations where light control is impossible or impractical.
Actually, combinied with a retroreflective surface, you could get greater than 100% light intenisty (along the projected path, at least). I have a DaLite HiPower screen which has a gain of 2.8 on-axis. Of course, it's less than 1.0 outside of a fairly narrow viewing angle.
It would be interesting to know what the visible reflectivity is (it will be greater than zero when summed over the visible spectrum) and what the "ideal" screen gain is with a matched filter pack in your projector. If the projector filters and screen don't match, it's gonna be like a CRT with one (or two) guns gone.
I RTFA, and followed the link, but didn't see the details mentioned.
I suspect that the screen will be required to match the bandpass of the dichroic filter which are placed in front of the projector lamp. (remember: bulbs are what you plant in the ground) If your projector does not use the same filter frequencies as the screen is designed to reflect, you will end up with color shifts in your output image (not enough red/green/blue, depending on your particular projecors setup).
The color of the screen in ambient light will depend on the color rendition of the lighting. Fluorescent lighting could really screw these things up, and you might see a red, green, or blue colored screen depending on the phosphor wavelengths. There might even be a whole new class of fl. lighting which is "black screen safe" and has dropoutsnear the frequencies of interest. The screens will also shift color depending on whether you have low color temperature incandescent or hogh color temperature incandescent lighting. One can hope that the bandpass of the screen is small enough that the brigtness of this background color is not apparent to the observer.
Well, sort of. My screen is 119" because a 133" screen wouldn't fit in the space I have. It's in a soffit above a bookcase in my livingroom. When I watch movies, it drops down in front of the books, and I get better picture, better sound, more comfortable seating, and better company than nearly every commercial theater within 60 miles of my house.
Sure, at about $9k for the setup ($5k of which is a projector which is worth about $1200 now) it may not be necessary or _practical_, in a dollar-cost-tradeoff with buying two movie tickets and a $5 coke every two weeks, but it sure is convenient. BTW - have you seen HD (favorite sport here)? Have you seen it on an entire wall of your living room?
Personally, I'm planning on a 15'-16' wide screen for my next house (2.35:1 ratio, for movies...that's about a 10' 4:3 screen). This material would be great, since I want to be able to watch sports events, too, while playing pool / eating / generally goofing off. I'd much prefer a light environment, and the wife would probably prefer that I didn't paint one end of the room flat black.
Now, a 24' screen. THAT would be impractical. Unless, of course, your having movie-night on the lawn in the back yard, in which case it's on the small side. All depends on your conditions.
this "Steward Filmscreen", as you call it, is a very good screen company. Their product is relatively expensive - too expensive for most low end hobbiests, IMO - but their customer service, by all accounts, is fabulous.
Don Stewart (the pres/owner) happened to post on several consumer/hobbiest web forums a while ago. He even came up with a screen which helped out the digital projector market (a grey screen, to help the black levels).
Actually, I have a local coopertive carrier, (pemtel.com) and get 630k/75k on a 768k/?k ADSL line and I'm about 20,000-21,000 feet from the CO. There are folks another 1/2mi or so down my road who can also get DSL, though I don't know their max speed. Of course, after calling every month for two years asking when they were going to put the switch in my town I know most of the folks in the telephone office...and they know me;-)
(Aside: when I first moved here four years ago, I called to ask what high speed internet options they had - pemtel owns both the tele and cable in this area. The rep cheerfully replied that they had JUST upgraded most of their modem pool to 56k, and would I like to sign up?)
Slashdot Mirror
If I get to work 30 seconds faster, and work 30 seconds later to get home at the "same" time, and I work 270days a year (I do), then I've just added $405 to my gross income, as I happen to bill $90/hr. My commuting mileage runs me about 2100mi/yr, at about 17mpg (Honda Pilot on hills/backroads, I've gotten up to 27 on long trips). That's $210/yr at the current gas prices in my area. By my logic, I'm actually MAKING $195/year just by driving irresponsibly.
Now, I don't really need an SUV, but because of the local climate and conditions, I do need a 4WD/AWD - and most of them get lousy gas mileage, and practically all of them which can seat 5 get lously mileage. I'd be happy paying $6/gallon at the pump if the leadership of this country said "No pertolium products or derivatives whose origin comes from a current or former member of OPEC may be sold in this country." I haven't seen much support for that idea.
My embargo would take care of problem 1, above, which apperas to be your biggest beef. I don't drive faster than the general flow of traffic, and I always use maximum (safe) acceleration when pulling into faster-moving traffic, so I do use some gas-guzzling for safety. Few of us have more money than we would like, but yes, I consciously chose a car and driving style which is less efficient than ideal, though I receive certain trade-off benefits for that choice.
Of course 30 seconds faster isn't much, even if I could justify it in dollars and cents. But every extra minute I get to spend with my baby daughter is - as they say in the Mastercard commercials - priceless. And though I may not be the most important person in the world, she is.
No, it probably isn't - or, rather, you can't make a product Just Like That (TM). If it could be done, it would take a great deal of expensive R&D...just like it did to create the modern drives (whose methods are patented now). That's why there are usually licencing fees that get paid. If the licensing fees are too high, then it will be worth it for you to do the R&D to do it a different way, then undercut the greedy bastards who wouldn't sell you patent rights. Or just wait 'til the patent expires.
Of COURSE he's not a feature, he's a...well, you know.
You'd better get some flight experience. If you think it's rough competing with lower paid workers on the other side of earth, imagaine how bad it will be when the other planets start providing outsourcing programming.
Does this mean the H1-B visas for aliens will take on new significance?
What is the likelihood that an inventor of the early 20th century would be able to detect an HDTV broadcast stream? It's random, at any real distance it's no stronger than the background radiation, and the apparatus he uses doesn't display moving pictures very well based on even a theortically perfect decoded data stream. Heck - he would be lost given a USB memory key to tinker around with. And that is - as you pointed out - just 100 years of progress.
Heck - they may have spent a thousand years of a large governmental program sending "signals to aliens", just to give up. And that was 600 million years ago.
EXCELLENT IDEA!
But, of course, I'll be expecting you to keep Hubble running until your Moon based fantasy^H^H^H^H^H^H^H plan is operational.
It's only advantages over ground based systems (you forgot gravity effects which tend to distort large collectors) happen to be practically insurmountable problems for ground based observations. For example, no matter how good and adaptive a ground based telescope is, there will always be 200 miles of soft-focus fishnet over the lens. Servicing it sucks, but it's still easier than putting a vacuum between a ground based telescope and a star.
And it drives me nuts browsing on "foreign" computers/browsers that don't support them. I only use two gestures (forward and back), and those two alone are worth the price of admission. If I could just make the rest of my programs emulate AutoCAD for pan and zoom I'd be in heaven (I mean, happy, not dead)
For those who don't happen to use ACAD, zoom is the scroll button, with the base point under the cursor, pan is click&drag with the scroll button. Gawd I wish my photo editor would work that way.
Interesting. You've never been to the Bath & Body Works site (http://www.bathandbodyworks.com) which will not let you in unless you're using Flash 6r79 AND IE/NS/Moz of their liking. Not an alternate site, not an email link, not a corporate 800 number.
It'd be nicer if they'd just say:
"YOU DON'T USE WHAT OUR WEB DESIGNER'S USE; GO FSCK YOURSELF"
(I found this out several months ago when they ran a web only promotion, and I couldn't get in to the site. I hate flash, and I use Opera.)
You should start by offering an absolute guarantee of privacy and confidentiality to all of their data, then "update" your terms of service after you've cast your net. It should be changed to alter the phrasing of sentences, adding additional protections for sensitive data, and on page 8 of the 10 page online-only scroll-only updates, mention the removal of "article 5b" (5b being the guarantee of privacy).
You'll offer another two updates, three or four weeks apart with minor changes to more wording, then delete all instances of the original and 1st update terms.
Did I mention that your TOS are compiled dynamically by including an image of partial words, rather than actual text (think of digitally creating a document out of the images you'd get if you confetti shredded a document)? No sense in having and incrimiating Google cache out there, or making it too easy for someone to print them out.
Last time I checked, most folks who were vaccinated for smallpox are no longer immune due the disease, and would hvae to be re-vaccinated. Also, most folks under 30 have never been vaccinated.
How quickly could you be vaccinated, and how long would it take to make you immune? If you were within the effective radius of an aerosol or downwind, would you relly be better off than if you were within the blast radius or fallout zone of a TN warhead? Radiation suits and underground shelters work much more quickly than vaccinations, and fusion bomb damage doesn't spread like a disease (though the local effects are, admittedly, more permanent).
Hundreds of people have already been compensated for the hours they worked on that film. The owners of the IP contained in the film, however, have invested a great deal of money. Reducing the number of people who will pay to see the film reduces the value of their investment. You can argue whether or not you feel bad for a corporation who has invested a hundred million in a film not realizing the maximum potential profit, but don't even think about making this about whether or not the set caterer or one of the special effects computer administrators has been "wronged" by this kid.
I DO think what he did was wrong. He should be fined - probably a nominal amount. Maybe a few hours community service if he's a rich kid, since mommy and daddy probably lose $2500 in their couch cushions on a bad day. If I was still in CA, though, I sure as heck wouldn't want to pay my tax $ to put this prick in jail.
I think the typical bounty is 10%. With potentially hundreds of thousands of copies via P2P:
$7.50/head x 100,000 viewings lost
$7.50/head x 150,000 repeat viewings
(you don't just watch it once, do you?)
$24.95 x 80,000 DVDs not purchased
$39.95 x 30,000 Special Edition DVDs not purchased
(there's always some repeat buyers)
Figure 10% of $5 million (we'll use round numbers) is about $500k in "reasonable" compensation for the buster.
Of course, If I were attorney general, I would seriously have to consider a violation of sales tax laws for this kid. I mean, the state just lost about $420k in sales tax revenue based on the losses suffered by the MPAA. (LA is 8.25%, right? I can't remember anymore)
Would this be like getting tips? Can the Theaters now only pay him $2.01 per hour, since he has another source of income from the patrons of the theater? That would make it even more necessary to collect the reward, and make the employees far more attentive.
Even better, maybe he can be hired on a contract piecework basis, and ONLY get paid when he finds a camcorder. Running of the equipment is a necessary part of his contract, since no movie=no need to have a camcorder.
This could be quite a boon for all of those barley-making-it megaplexes.
(did I forget to open the sarcasm tag? oops, my bad)
I shouldn't have been so hard on space elevators. Anything that requires a cable to get something into orbit would qualify for my ire. (Somebosy at MSFC is bound and determined to put everything in orbit with a cable...it's like a broken record)
No, it's not about technical limits, it's about financial limits. NASA does a lot of continuous research, both alone and with other agencies, such as NOAA. It's all stuff we take for granted now, kind of like sending the shuttle up three or four times a year. It's not sexy anymore just to get to orbit.
The problem is that the "next big thing" costs a lot of money. Think in terms of $1E12 to $3E12. Thats where preliminary Mars Mission estimates hit. Bush announced his plans for the Mars mission, then offered to give them an extra $1E7 to $1E8 over the next ten years to pull it off. I see no less than 3 orders of magnitude shortfall.
Think that number is out of line? Wiki mentions $1E10 as the 1994 cost of Apollo. Though not listed at Wiki, I would expect the Shuttle program cost somewhere in the $1E11 range. Given inflation of both costs and expectations, $1E12 is a good target for the next likely Big Thing.
With the retaliatory action in Afghanistan and the personal vendetta persued in Iraq, along with a not-red-hot-bubble-driven-economy tax base, we're back in the red by $5E11 a year, and still owe $7E12.
NASA doesnt seem to have vision because there's really no money to do a marquis program properly. They're trying to start a high profile program, funded by scraping the sides of the financial pudding bowl. It just isn't going to work. Gee Whiz is expensive - it always has been. Now that we pay for overhead and profit of corporations in addition to the research and development, its even more expensive than it used to be.
NASA hasn't lost it focus, it's been beaten out of them. How much would you expect to spend for the next Hollywood super-blockbuster? I'll give you a budget of $750,000. And I want three films. And amazing special effects - stuff never done before. Throw in a couple of name actors, too - that'll help the marketing. You'd start putting together Blair Witch Project ideas, too, faced with that kind of scenerio.
Of course, if your food/water/air recycling equipment fail/run out before you can get back home, you die.
All of a sudden you have the same problem as you started with, just on a larger scale. sure, they can radio back to earth (assuming they have commnications) and send up a rescue party. Remind me again how long it takes to re-certify the Shuttle to fly after a failure.
Your initial scenerio had two equipment failures (two rovers). My scenerio has two equipment failures (mobile base and shuttle).
Face it, a mobile base makes about as much sense as a space elevator.
But remove the alive part. There's no sense in taking a chance they might end up back on the street.
And America wouldn't have had a space program. To quote Tom Lehrer's song on WvB's life, "'Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down. That's not my department.' says Werner von Braun"
/. demographic's alley. TL, for those who don't know, is still alive and living in SoCal, but he's got that old man bitterness that spoils the old sarcasm of his songs.)
(If you're too young to have listened to Tom Lehrer, find $30 and go buy his CDs. It's a hilarious view of the world in the 1960s, by a singing mathemetician/professor from MIT. Right up the
You are correct, but you really shouldn't be bothering the marketing folks with facts. It just's wasted your time and annoys the 'droids.
Huh? You've got fantastic light control in a theater, why would you spend a zillion bux to upgrade your screen and projector tecnology? This is for the high-ambient-light situations where light control is impossible or impractical.
Actually, combinied with a retroreflective surface, you could get greater than 100% light intenisty (along the projected path, at least). I have a DaLite HiPower screen which has a gain of 2.8 on-axis. Of course, it's less than 1.0 outside of a fairly narrow viewing angle.
It would be interesting to know what the visible reflectivity is (it will be greater than zero when summed over the visible spectrum) and what the "ideal" screen gain is with a matched filter pack in your projector. If the projector filters and screen don't match, it's gonna be like a CRT with one (or two) guns gone.
I RTFA, and followed the link, but didn't see the details mentioned.
I suspect that the screen will be required to match the bandpass of the dichroic filter which are placed in front of the projector lamp. (remember: bulbs are what you plant in the ground) If your projector does not use the same filter frequencies as the screen is designed to reflect, you will end up with color shifts in your output image (not enough red/green/blue, depending on your particular projecors setup).
The color of the screen in ambient light will depend on the color rendition of the lighting. Fluorescent lighting could really screw these things up, and you might see a red, green, or blue colored screen depending on the phosphor wavelengths. There might even be a whole new class of fl. lighting which is "black screen safe" and has dropoutsnear the frequencies of interest. The screens will also shift color depending on whether you have low color temperature incandescent or hogh color temperature incandescent lighting. One can hope that the bandpass of the screen is small enough that the brigtness of this background color is not apparent to the observer.
Well, sort of. My screen is 119" because a 133" screen wouldn't fit in the space I have. It's in a soffit above a bookcase in my livingroom. When I watch movies, it drops down in front of the books, and I get better picture, better sound, more comfortable seating, and better company than nearly every commercial theater within 60 miles of my house.
Sure, at about $9k for the setup ($5k of which is a projector which is worth about $1200 now) it may not be necessary or _practical_, in a dollar-cost-tradeoff with buying two movie tickets and a $5 coke every two weeks, but it sure is convenient. BTW - have you seen HD (favorite sport here)? Have you seen it on an entire wall of your living room?
Personally, I'm planning on a 15'-16' wide screen for my next house (2.35:1 ratio, for movies...that's about a 10' 4:3 screen). This material would be great, since I want to be able to watch sports events, too, while playing pool / eating / generally goofing off. I'd much prefer a light environment, and the wife would probably prefer that I didn't paint one end of the room flat black.
Now, a 24' screen. THAT would be impractical. Unless, of course, your having movie-night on the lawn in the back yard, in which case it's on the small side. All depends on your conditions.
this "Steward Filmscreen", as you call it, is a very good screen company. Their product is relatively expensive - too expensive for most low end hobbiests, IMO - but their customer service, by all accounts, is fabulous.
/., too.
Don Stewart (the pres/owner) happened to post on several consumer/hobbiest web forums a while ago. He even came up with a screen which helped out the digital projector market (a grey screen, to help the black levels).
I almost wouldn't be suprised if he read
Actually, I have a local coopertive carrier, (pemtel.com) and get 630k/75k on a 768k/?k ADSL line and I'm about 20,000-21,000 feet from the CO. There are folks another 1/2mi or so down my road who can also get DSL, though I don't know their max speed. Of course, after calling every month for two years asking when they were going to put the switch in my town I know most of the folks in the telephone office...and they know me ;-)
(Aside: when I first moved here four years ago, I called to ask what high speed internet options they had - pemtel owns both the tele and cable in this area. The rep cheerfully replied that they had JUST upgraded most of their modem pool to 56k, and would I like to sign up?)