I've got a 1995 Suzuki Swift. It's got a 1.3-liter 4-cyl for 70 horsepower. Not a super speedy item, it tops out at 85mph, but I get 40-46mpg average. Even when I go to California and drive over the mountain passes from Washington I average 38-40mpg.
I was simply unaware of the Suzuki Swift's engine size. I can't speak for how well they do where I live. Other 1.2ish sized engines peformed very poorly. I don't think I've ever met one.
The last time I went over the mountain passes south of Ashland, Or in my 1997 Nissan Sentra 1.6... I also got 37-40ish. The worst i've seen is 35mpg goign up Mount Rainier. There is no chance in hell i'd get 85mpg in my Sentra. I'd have to try the Swift, but my experence with sub 1.6l simply has not been great.
Now Geo Metro is another story. I've known many people who had those. And they did indeed get above 40mpg on average. often 47-55 from what I was told when they were new. But, I don't know of any 3cyl Metro that still works.
Average Joe wants 300hp SUV and neon spinnered RX-8's
I guess I know some tame joes. Most everyone I know personaly is hip on either the Corolla/Camery, Civic/Accord, Sentra, or entry level Suburu. They wouldn't consider Tercel for it's piss poor mpg in contrast to Corolla, and would think twice about the Sentra as it doesn't test as well in safety tests, and the sub sub compacts not even close to being safe enough. In other words, cars in the 1.6-1.8l class.
So it's MS's fault when some other hardware maker gives you crappy drivers?
I didn't say it was MS's fault, only that BSOD is not unheard of. I know mine *will* crash out of the box. Whether or not it's their fault is a debate for another time. Oddly enough I found 2k to be less prone to BSOD and still have it installed to help resolve issues with XP.
Everyone I know that has XP has had to reinstall it at least once. If not for virus, spyware, or other odd 3rd party software problems it was due to their own service packs.
Lets start blaming MS for rainy days and dead goldfish!
Well they are a Redmond based company, and it does rain a fair bit, they could be exporting it. As far as dead gold fish, I imagine when they order Indian food, pick out the meat and dump the sauce they *might* be killing gold fish. But these are your conspircy theories and not mine.
"why on earth are all the stupid celebrities and Americans spending a fortune buying these cars from the Japanese which are WORSE for the environment than a normal petrol car at HALF the price?"
The only autos I know that get greater than 40mpg are either the rare few ultra compacts, or VWs turbo diesels which are NOT sold in California the last time I checked. In fact there are many states in America that can't sell diesel passanger cars.
If you want to save the environment, buy a small/light car with a small engine (sub 1.2L) and drive it sensibly.
I have known a couple of people who imported Nissans with 1.2l engines from Canada here and they did worse then their 1.5l counterpart. On flat land they are more efficent but take a city like San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle and chances are you'll be sucking up the gas faster than Mustang.
I understand where you are comming from. I even owned a 1.5l for a while. I thought I didn't need anything larger. It wasn't long before I upgraded to a 1.6. The difference was 30mpg on the 1.5 and 35 to 40mpg on the 1.6l. If I honestly thought i'd save money going with a smaller engine i'd import one in a snap.
Have you actually seen a BSOD in the last 3 or 4 years?
I just saw one the last time I was trying to reply to this message. No really, this isn't a flame or troll. But yes I've seen tons of BSsOD on 2k and XP mostly due to some crappy driver, specificly the out of the box sound blaster live drivers. If not crappy drivers, then some codec conflicting with another codec, or my favorite Roxio.
It seems the American customer is finally getting sick of filling in those forms.
I remember when and older woman went to the local Office Depot to buy one of their PCs on special. The price paid out of pocket was pretty clear but the thing had rebates up to high heaven. Compaq by HP rebate, HP by HP rebate, KDS rebate, Office Depot rebate, not just a single office depot rebate but one for the whole package, and one each for monitor, system, and printer. So about 7 seperate forms and things to fill out. She couldn't make heads or tails of the rebates... so she went back to the store and sure enough after 2hours they filled everything out for her. I would like to think if more people did this perhaps the stores would be less inclined to offer rabates.
Did you think they were just going to let you keep the movie?
I for one thought it was like the NetFlix deal where you *could* in theory keep the movie but they would just not let you rent any more until you returned them and nag you about it. Given the fact they sell these discs for about $10-$20 it wasn't too good to be true. A short term loss but would balance out if it got more people in the store.
This statement makes the assumption that people that don't listen to the radio don't have other means of hearing new music.
One of the reasons I took my old walkman fishing and camping was the fact that it had a radio. It was nice being able to listen to tapes and it was nice to catch weather reports. Radios are very useful things at times and it's shocking to me that it's no longer fashionable to put them into portable media players.
What I want should have been on the market some time ago. Small like a CD player but takes DVD media. Small to largish screen would be nice, enough to scroll though 10 selections at a time.
Ipod is nice, but it's spendy and it's battery life is very limited. Digital media players are cool and great for jogging but not everyone has the ability to play them. Media cost is high.
DVD-R MP3 can be played on most DVD players. It's an established technology already in use everywhere. The cost for the media is sub $1/disc or sub $5.00 for DL. Storage 4.7gig to 8.5gig DL. While it does require access to a DVD-R drive, those are priced under $100.
But I want my player to look like an ass! I want it to look like something out of The Naked Lunch! I want it to be organic and pornographicly ergonomic.
If I remember correctly, digital answering machines use "reject" RAM chips that aren't suitable for data storage, because minor dropped bits in a recorded message aren't discernible.
Correction...
Digital Answering machines that use "reject" Ram chips that are not suitable for anything, because random dropped bits in a recorded message renders it discernible.
At least that's been MY experience with them. Dropped bits always occur when ever anyone relays important information like a phone number, time, place, address, or flight number.
You must pardon my amazement, I simply have not seen a B&W sold in 2 decades, save some odd sub 8 inch portable models and security monitors, both of which were priced higher than their color counterparts.
Try watching BBC in the UK without paying your license. If you push it far enough, men with guns will show up and escort you to gaol.
In the US there are sometimes people who work for the cable company who look for unauthorized taps. They won't be sent to gaol, but they might be sent to prison, which is sad as i've heard the gaols in the UK are much nicer.
But needless to say none of our cable companies are arms of the goverment.
News to me - afaik to encode colour NTSC, PAL and SECAM all use YUV so that the luma (Y) component is available for monochrome viewing...
I should have phrased this better. I was refering to the old VHF standard for B&W a child post correctly informed me was 405 lines. I was assuming that B&W ment the old VHF standard rather than the current UHF standard. I was not aware they made B&W TVs that had tuners compatable with color PAL. In NTSC land, we can still use TVs older than dirt until such time we upgrade to digital.
The right thing would be to work out some way of charging you guys in the US for it, or making a timely release on DVD.
In lue of pay downloading, the RIGHT thing to do is getting your local cable operator to carry CBC. I get their Vancover station CBUT my self. It is the best station to catch the Olympics. There are a handful of cities in the US who get a CBC feed.
IMHO, the best thing the BBC or any media comapny can do to generate revune from downloading is to offer licenced offical covers for material you get. Think about it. Inkjet ink costs between $3000 and $10,000 a gallon and a full DVD cover would cost you a buck or two in ink at least. Nice paper costs about 20 to 30 cents/sheet. And not to speak of the time it takes to make a semi-decent one. Companies like the BBC could make a mint selling DVD covers and labels. I'm sure other people like my self would be happy to spend at least $5.00 for a cover, and at the same time the media gets licenced for personal use. Why get expoited by medium providers when you can get exploited by media providers.
The "bootleggers" have been turned into marketing tools!
Bootleggers have always been marketing tools. That mix tape you got from a friend is little more than a big ass advertisment for a bunch of bands you might not have heard of. It's cool, thoughtful, and a great low cost gift, but is also a means of promoting things you like to others who otherwise couldn't be bothered.
So if the BBC has decided to promote them selves via P2P networks, I'm all for it.
The annual cost (set by the Government) is currently £121. A black and white TV licence is £40-50.
NTSC people like my self need a brief explanation. PAL doesn't have provisions like NTSC for B&W and Color on the same signal. I.E. They have seperate towers for B&W users than color.
Wasn't it established decades ago that it was costing them more money to continue to provide B&W service than they had subscribers? And wasn't it also established that it would more cost effective to just buy the remaining B&W users color sets?
Is there some reason they continue to provide B&W service?
This reminds me of the old days of 3.5" floppy disks, when you'd cut a notch to make it double sided. Everyone would laugh and joke at how they'd stick it to the man, and then save their "Wizardry" games or word processing documents on disks that would eventually crap out on them.
How would you be sticking it to the man? Those were 5.25 (not 3.5) inch disks and were sold as DD (double sided double density). Drives that didn't need to use the index hole could be nibbled and you could right to the other side. The media was writable on both sides but when you turned it upside down there was no write enable notch so you couldn't write to it. Drives which actually used the index hole couldn't be nibbled unless you you made another index hole on the other side.
Now single sided disks marked SS SD (Single Sided Single/Double Density) might only have magnetic media on one side. I.e. there was nothing to write to on the second side. The last time I saw one was circa 1983 at Toys R Us.
I don't see how one is sticking it to the man when they sold a disc that was labeled double sided but needed to be nibbled in order to flip the disk to be used in single sided drives.
it was the same with floppies... I never trusted any floppy that some moron punched a hole in.
This is why I put a switch on my drive so I could switch between HD and DD. This was circa 1989 when local stores within walking distance simply did not sell HD discs. The only one who did wanted $40+ a 10 pack. It was true that the DD media was sub par to HD media at the time, it was good enough to exchange files. I think I may have used as many as 30 floppies in this way. Later on we believed that they used the same media all around, but by that point it was easy to find HD media.
Circa 1994 (or so) the reverse was true, local stores with the notable exception of the military PX. If you needed DD one could tape the hole on the disc.
The IBM PS/2 486slc series stock Sony 2.88meg drive didn't pay any attention to the hole. You could format 720K / 1.44M / 2.88M on any disc you threw at it, with the exception of PX discs which were DD in terms of label, the hole, and the media.
This is not feature restriction, the manufacturer is not trying to screw you... They put an extra hole in the tape to tell the player that this tape will actually work with the deck properly!
There reaches a point in the manufacturing of media when it becomes more cost effective to produce one type rather than separate types if the one type will work for all.
If you don't let the inspector in, they can only gain entry to search for an illegal telly by providing evidence that you have one to a court - typically this will be done by using TV detector equipment, or observing the glow of a TV through the curtains from the street at night. Not sure if they use that one so much today seeing as it could be a PC monitor and not a telly
Unless I'm mistaken... computer monitors refresh at a minimum of 60hz often times 72hz or higher. Wouldn't the glow be different? Here in NTSC land in order to test a camera shutter speed I use a standard TV and watch it through the frame as I snap at 1/60th, 1/125th, 1/250th... etc etc. higher than 1/60ths will show 1/2 the TV screen, 1/4, 1/8th etc etc. Could not a similar technique be used in Pal land?
The problem with this is that most people who download TV are not going to be in that broadcast area
Take into account that broadband isn't widely available in the states. We suck in this regard!
In cases like Simpsons, Friends, and Enterprise I can see where the UK would have a higher demand. But in cases like Farscape, Stargate (Atlantis & SG1), and Battlestar Galactica it's the US who's demanding them from the UK. I suspect that UK is still tops for downloading these programs that are broadcast first there by a few months.
But I'm going to disagree on the idea of the demand for downloads being solely based on programing that is not available in your region. Let's say for example I wanted to collect Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I could
1. Invest in VCR/PVR/video digitizer Tape/Record when it's on. 2. Wait till the DVDs are out 3. Download
VHS tape bulky, low quality, and a hassel esp if you have a cable box or a dish system. PVRs are nice but are a tad spendy Digitizers/TV cards cost a few bucks, but are complex to use, and depend on you the end user to have a good signal and decent cables to get a good result. Firewire isn't so bad so long as the cable/dish feed is good and strong.
Downloading depends on someone else having a PVR/Digitizer who likely already has invested in good cables and has a good signal. It's already a file which can easly be chucked into a disc for playback on most DVD players. Takes time to fetch, but but you don't have to plan ahead or invest in any special equipment.
I'm not going to disagree with the fact that the highest demand for telivision DLs are for people who want to get programing not in their region. But this doesn't negate the fact that there could also be a large demand for people in the broadcast area of an affiliate who are too cheap to or lazy to buy a Tivo. And who knows... perhaps one day it may be possible for me in the states to pay for a BBC feed rather than paying for BBC-America or waiting for PBS to to air stuff.
People know FOX is channel 7, or 11, but what channel is it when you're downloading from a website? Even if it is fox's website.
www.fox.com?
If you want to keep it traditional, affiliates could offer downloads of shows for people with a confermed address in their regular broadcast area. Revenue could be earned as always by selling ads. As a bonus you wouldn't need a neilson box to judge ratings.
Just project the 8mm/16mm film images onto a bright-white screen that has a lot of reflectivity to it, physically place a camcorder directly above the project - or slightly above and slightly behind - to minimize the "trapezoid" effect, record the projection with the camcorder, then use one of the many analog-to-digital bridges out there to transfer it to your PC.
To really minimize the trapezoid effect, what you need to do is project the image to a screen with a lot of translucidity to it and record from the other side. Such kits were available for filming film. I had a kit I bought 2nd hand specificly for making negatives from slides.
I'd personally like to see how you can do this as a home user. There's got to be a software program that does this sort of thing (ok maybe not the the extent that hollywood giants can do) or at least approaches it.
You have technicolor home movies? The best film I have from my family archive was from christmas 1942 and it was Eastman Kodak Kodacolor IIRC. I never knew anyone who had a technicolor camera which requires three reels of B&W film and a prism.
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basement-dwelling nerd who has saved every system he's owned since 1980. :)
Sorry, the vic20 is not rated for heavy loads.
I've got a 1995 Suzuki Swift. It's got a 1.3-liter 4-cyl for 70 horsepower. Not a super speedy item, it tops out at 85mph, but I get 40-46mpg average. Even when I go to California and drive over the mountain passes from Washington I average 38-40mpg.
I was simply unaware of the Suzuki Swift's engine size. I can't speak for how well they do where I live. Other 1.2ish sized engines peformed very poorly. I don't think I've ever met one.
The last time I went over the mountain passes south of Ashland, Or in my 1997 Nissan Sentra 1.6... I also got 37-40ish. The worst i've seen is 35mpg goign up Mount Rainier. There is no chance in hell i'd get 85mpg in my Sentra. I'd have to try the Swift, but my experence with sub 1.6l simply has not been great.
Now Geo Metro is another story. I've known many people who had those. And they did indeed get above 40mpg on average. often 47-55 from what I was told when they were new. But, I don't know of any 3cyl Metro that still works.
Average Joe wants 300hp SUV and neon spinnered RX-8's
I guess I know some tame joes. Most everyone I know personaly is hip on either the Corolla/Camery, Civic/Accord, Sentra, or entry level Suburu. They wouldn't consider Tercel for it's piss poor mpg in contrast to Corolla, and would think twice about the Sentra as it doesn't test as well in safety tests, and the sub sub compacts not even close to being safe enough. In other words, cars in the 1.6-1.8l class.
So it's MS's fault when some other hardware maker gives you crappy drivers?
I didn't say it was MS's fault, only that BSOD is not unheard of. I know mine *will* crash out of the box. Whether or not it's their fault is a debate for another time. Oddly enough I found 2k to be less prone to BSOD and still have it installed to help resolve issues with XP.
Everyone I know that has XP has had to reinstall it at least once. If not for virus, spyware, or other odd 3rd party software problems it was due to their own service packs.
Lets start blaming MS for rainy days and dead goldfish!
Well they are a Redmond based company, and it does rain a fair bit, they could be exporting it. As far as dead gold fish, I imagine when they order Indian food, pick out the meat and dump the sauce they *might* be killing gold fish. But these are your conspircy theories and not mine.
"why on earth are all the stupid celebrities and Americans spending a fortune buying these cars from the Japanese which are WORSE for the environment than a normal petrol car at HALF the price?"
The only autos I know that get greater than 40mpg are either the rare few ultra compacts, or VWs turbo diesels which are NOT sold in California the last time I checked. In fact there are many states in America that can't sell diesel passanger cars.
If you want to save the environment, buy a small/light car with a small engine (sub 1.2L) and drive it sensibly.
I have known a couple of people who imported Nissans with 1.2l engines from Canada here and they did worse then their 1.5l counterpart. On flat land they are more efficent but take a city like San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle and chances are you'll be sucking up the gas faster than Mustang.
I understand where you are comming from. I even owned a 1.5l for a while. I thought I didn't need anything larger. It wasn't long before I upgraded to a 1.6. The difference was 30mpg on the 1.5 and 35 to 40mpg on the 1.6l. If I honestly thought i'd save money going with a smaller engine i'd import one in a snap.
Have you actually seen a BSOD in the last 3 or 4 years?
I just saw one the last time I was trying to reply to this message. No really, this isn't a flame or troll. But yes I've seen tons of BSsOD on 2k and XP mostly due to some crappy driver, specificly the out of the box sound blaster live drivers. If not crappy drivers, then some codec conflicting with another codec, or my favorite Roxio.
Things are better, but they are far from perfect.
It seems the American customer is finally getting sick of filling in those forms.
I remember when and older woman went to the local Office Depot to buy one of their PCs on special. The price paid out of pocket was pretty clear but the thing had rebates up to high heaven. Compaq by HP rebate, HP by HP rebate, KDS rebate, Office Depot rebate, not just a single office depot rebate but one for the whole package, and one each for monitor, system, and printer. So about 7 seperate forms and things to fill out. She couldn't make heads or tails of the rebates... so she went back to the store and sure enough after 2hours they filled everything out for her. I would like to think if more people did this perhaps the stores would be less inclined to offer rabates.
Did you think they were just going to let you keep the movie?
I for one thought it was like the NetFlix deal where you *could* in theory keep the movie but they would just not let you rent any more until you returned them and nag you about it. Given the fact they sell these discs for about $10-$20 it wasn't too good to be true. A short term loss but would balance out if it got more people in the store.
This statement makes the assumption that people that don't listen to the radio don't have other means of hearing new music.
One of the reasons I took my old walkman fishing and camping was the fact that it had a radio. It was nice being able to listen to tapes and it was nice to catch weather reports. Radios are very useful things at times and it's shocking to me that it's no longer fashionable to put them into portable media players.
What I want should have been on the market some time ago. Small like a CD player but takes DVD media. Small to largish screen would be nice, enough to scroll though 10 selections at a time.
Ipod is nice, but it's spendy and it's battery life is very limited.
Digital media players are cool and great for jogging but not everyone has the ability to play them. Media cost is high.
DVD-R MP3 can be played on most DVD players. It's an established technology already in use everywhere. The cost for the media is sub $1/disc or sub $5.00 for DL. Storage 4.7gig to 8.5gig DL. While it does require access to a DVD-R drive, those are priced under $100.
3. My player should not look like an ass
But I want my player to look like an ass! I want it to look like something out of The Naked Lunch! I want it to be organic and pornographicly ergonomic.
If I remember correctly, digital answering machines use "reject" RAM chips that aren't suitable for data storage, because minor dropped bits in a recorded message aren't discernible.
Correction...
Digital Answering machines that use "reject" Ram chips that are not suitable for anything, because random dropped bits in a recorded message renders it discernible.
At least that's been MY experience with them. Dropped bits always occur when ever anyone relays important information like a phone number, time, place, address, or flight number.
What, you like sharing a Victorian cell meant for one with two other people, and having to slop out in the morning because it doesn't have a loo?
I guess it's just a step more humane then *some* US prisons that we see on TV.
I would rather not, but given the choice i'd pick taller ceilings and the less crowded cell without a loo any day of the week.
I'll watch one such in bed this evening!
You must pardon my amazement, I simply have not seen a B&W sold in 2 decades, save some odd sub 8 inch portable models and security monitors, both of which were priced higher than their color counterparts.
Try watching BBC in the UK without paying your license. If you push it far enough, men with guns will show up and escort you to gaol.
In the US there are sometimes people who work for the cable company who look for unauthorized taps. They won't be sent to gaol, but they might be sent to prison, which is sad as i've heard the gaols in the UK are much nicer.
But needless to say none of our cable companies are arms of the goverment.
News to me - afaik to encode colour NTSC, PAL and SECAM all use YUV so that the luma (Y) component is available for monochrome viewing...
I should have phrased this better. I was refering to the old VHF standard for B&W a child post correctly informed me was 405 lines. I was assuming that B&W ment the old VHF standard rather than the current UHF standard. I was not aware they made B&W TVs that had tuners compatable with color PAL. In NTSC land, we can still use TVs older than dirt until such time we upgrade to digital.
The right thing would be to work out some way of charging you guys in the US for it, or making a timely release on DVD.
In lue of pay downloading, the RIGHT thing to do is getting your local cable operator to carry CBC. I get their Vancover station CBUT my self. It is the best station to catch the Olympics. There are a handful of cities in the US who get a CBC feed.
IMHO, the best thing the BBC or any media comapny can do to generate revune from downloading is to offer licenced offical covers for material you get. Think about it. Inkjet ink costs between $3000 and $10,000 a gallon and a full DVD cover would cost you a buck or two in ink at least. Nice paper costs about 20 to 30 cents/sheet. And not to speak of the time it takes to make a semi-decent one. Companies like the BBC could make a mint selling DVD covers and labels. I'm sure other people like my self would be happy to spend at least $5.00 for a cover, and at the same time the media gets licenced for personal use. Why get expoited by medium providers when you can get exploited by media providers.
The "bootleggers" have been turned into marketing tools!
Bootleggers have always been marketing tools. That mix tape you got from a friend is little more than a big ass advertisment for a bunch of bands you might not have heard of. It's cool, thoughtful, and a great low cost gift, but is also a means of promoting things you like to others who otherwise couldn't be bothered.
So if the BBC has decided to promote them selves via P2P networks, I'm all for it.
The annual cost (set by the Government) is currently £121. A black and white TV licence is £40-50.
NTSC people like my self need a brief explanation. PAL doesn't have provisions like NTSC for B&W and Color on the same signal. I.E. They have seperate towers for B&W users than color.
Wasn't it established decades ago that it was costing them more money to continue to provide B&W service than they had subscribers? And wasn't it also established that it would more cost effective to just buy the remaining B&W users color sets?
Is there some reason they continue to provide B&W service?
This reminds me of the old days of 3.5" floppy disks, when you'd cut a notch to make it double sided. Everyone would laugh and joke at how they'd stick it to the man, and then save their "Wizardry" games or word processing documents on disks that would eventually crap out on them.
How would you be sticking it to the man? Those were 5.25 (not 3.5) inch disks and were sold as DD (double sided double density). Drives that didn't need to use the index hole could be nibbled and you could right to the other side. The media was writable on both sides but when you turned it upside down there was no write enable notch so you couldn't write to it. Drives which actually used the index hole couldn't be nibbled unless you you made another index hole on the other side.
Now single sided disks marked SS SD (Single Sided Single/Double Density) might only have magnetic media on one side. I.e. there was nothing to write to on the second side. The last time I saw one was circa 1983 at Toys R Us.
I don't see how one is sticking it to the man when they sold a disc that was labeled double sided but needed to be nibbled in order to flip the disk to be used in single sided drives.
it was the same with floppies... I never trusted any floppy that some moron punched a hole in.
This is why I put a switch on my drive so I could switch between HD and DD. This was circa 1989 when local stores within walking distance simply did not sell HD discs. The only one who did wanted $40+ a 10 pack. It was true that the DD media was sub par to HD media at the time, it was good enough to exchange files. I think I may have used as many as 30 floppies in this way. Later on we believed that they used the same media all around, but by that point it was easy to find HD media.
Circa 1994 (or so) the reverse was true, local stores with the notable exception of the military PX. If you needed DD one could tape the hole on the disc.
The IBM PS/2 486slc series stock Sony 2.88meg drive didn't pay any attention to the hole. You could format 720K / 1.44M / 2.88M on any disc you threw at it, with the exception of PX discs which were DD in terms of label, the hole, and the media.
This is not feature restriction, the manufacturer is not trying to screw you... They put an extra hole in the tape to tell the player that this tape will actually work with the deck properly!
There reaches a point in the manufacturing of media when it becomes more cost effective to produce one type rather than separate types if the one type will work for all.
If you don't let the inspector in, they can only gain entry to search for an illegal telly by providing evidence that you have one to a court - typically this will be done by using TV detector equipment, or observing the glow of a TV through the curtains from the street at night. Not sure if they use that one so much today seeing as it could be a PC monitor and not a telly
Unless I'm mistaken... computer monitors refresh at a minimum of 60hz often times 72hz or higher. Wouldn't the glow be different? Here in NTSC land in order to test a camera shutter speed I use a standard TV and watch it through the frame as I snap at 1/60th, 1/125th, 1/250th... etc etc. higher than 1/60ths will show 1/2 the TV screen, 1/4, 1/8th etc etc. Could not a similar technique be used in Pal land?
The problem with this is that most people who download TV are not going to be in that broadcast area
Take into account that broadband isn't widely available in the states. We suck in this regard!
In cases like Simpsons, Friends, and Enterprise I can see where the UK would have a higher demand. But in cases like Farscape, Stargate (Atlantis & SG1), and Battlestar Galactica it's the US who's demanding them from the UK. I suspect that UK is still tops for downloading these programs that are broadcast first there by a few months.
But I'm going to disagree on the idea of the demand for downloads being solely based on programing that is not available in your region. Let's say for example I wanted to collect Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I could
1. Invest in VCR/PVR/video digitizer Tape/Record when it's on.
2. Wait till the DVDs are out
3. Download
VHS tape bulky, low quality, and a hassel esp if you have a cable box or a dish system.
PVRs are nice but are a tad spendy
Digitizers/TV cards cost a few bucks, but are complex to use, and depend on you the end user to have a good signal and decent cables to get a good result.
Firewire isn't so bad so long as the cable/dish feed is good and strong.
Downloading depends on someone else having a PVR/Digitizer who likely already has invested in good cables and has a good signal. It's already a file which can easly be chucked into a disc for playback on most DVD players. Takes time to fetch, but but you don't have to plan ahead or invest in any special equipment.
I'm not going to disagree with the fact that the highest demand for telivision DLs are for people who want to get programing not in their region. But this doesn't negate the fact that there could also be a large demand for people in the broadcast area of an affiliate who are too cheap to or lazy to buy a Tivo. And who knows... perhaps one day it may be possible for me in the states to pay for a BBC feed rather than paying for BBC-America or waiting for PBS to to air stuff.
People know FOX is channel 7, or 11, but what channel is it when you're downloading from a website? Even if it is fox's website.
www.fox.com?
If you want to keep it traditional, affiliates could offer downloads of shows for people with a confermed address in their regular broadcast area. Revenue could be earned as always by selling ads. As a bonus you wouldn't need a neilson box to judge ratings.
Just project the 8mm/16mm film images onto a bright-white screen that has a lot of reflectivity to it, physically place a camcorder directly above the project - or slightly above and slightly behind - to minimize the "trapezoid" effect, record the projection with the camcorder, then use one of the many analog-to-digital bridges out there to transfer it to your PC.
To really minimize the trapezoid effect, what you need to do is project the image to a screen with a lot of translucidity to it and record from the other side. Such kits were available for filming film. I had a kit I bought 2nd hand specificly for making negatives from slides.
I'd personally like to see how you can do this as a home user. There's got to be a software program that does this sort of thing (ok maybe not the the extent that hollywood giants can do) or at least approaches it.
You have technicolor home movies? The best film I have from my family archive was from christmas 1942 and it was Eastman Kodak Kodacolor IIRC. I never knew anyone who had a technicolor camera which requires three reels of B&W film and a prism.