> I was looking into projectors as well, but > discovered a big drawback: the bulbs are good for > about 2000 hours and then run about $350 (on > average) for a new one. That's a lot of money > every couple of years...
Um... the way I look at it, I could've paid about 3000e for a puny 30-40" wide screen TV, or 2-3 times as much for a plasma display (and that's still pretty nasty to lug around), or about 2000e plus 350e every two years for a small, light unit that gives me a wallful of eye candy. By the time the price gets even, i'll be changing equipment anyway.
Your prices in the US will vary, but the proportions shouldn't be too far off.
(And why isn't this bloody thing accepting ISO-8859-15 euro chars?)
> A piece of sensible legislation. > It's high time other countries followed soot.
Some countries already did. (They got lost in the chimney. Others followed suit. Well, actually, they sort of took the lead in the matter. Not to belittle NZ, though - the legally required disabling of region control in DVD players was great.)
This is a perfect example of scare tactics of the music industry. Making copies of video/audio (for personal use, where "personal" means you and your immediate family) has long been legal in Finland. In fact, this right extends to making a copy or two of borrowed material, be it from a friend or from a library.
As inconceivable as it is to the RIA* noisemakers, the movie and music publishers are in perfect health and seem to be making a tidy profit even in this land of moral decay.
Caveat: to compensate for this, there is a fee on recordable media. This would be sort of OK, but the folks supposedly distributing the fees among copyright holders aren't all that forthcoming with their policies, and this is the same bunch of RIAA equivalents that want fees from kindergarten classes singing copyrighted christmas songs and taxis with the radio playing.
Current legislators don't seem to be quite as savvy when it comes to cultural wealth: software copies are restricted to a single backup, and opening DRMS'ed content is now illegal, if I remember recent developments correctly. No doubt the media companies lobby effectively even here.
By the way, I'm fairly certain.fi is not a pathfinder. Haven't the other Nordic countries and Canada been pretty progressive?
It's not yourself speaking you want to visualize - it's your environment. I personally think that transmitting a photo of your beach vacation is silly, but on-the-fly image recognition, OCR, and
translation services could actually have something in them. The phone-camera combination is your light-weight client, and the hard processing is done remotely, probably as a pay service.
I personally wouldn't mind having a huge, convenient visual dictionary available. Point, shoot, wait, and read:
"The Sydney opera house, built in blah blah, Press 'more' for further information."
"The object you are looking at is a Bengalese tiger. Run."
Come to think of it - Google, need a project manager for this?;)
> Strangely enough it's all contained on packets with a size of 1/2 human genome...
It's called lossy compression, and they do all sorts of optimizations to achieve that. The quality of the duplicate is never comparable to the original. Of course, a lot depends on the codec of the reproduction implementation; some produce better results than others. You probably want to read through tests (try Google) before deciding on the one you want.
> Cell phones are the death of gentility and manners.
You've got cause and effect mixed up. Cell phones reveal the lack of gentility and manners. Cell phones make the idiot audible.
> I carry a pager. I don't have to answer. I still get to friends and parties. They can even let me know if it is an emergency.
I carry a phone. I don't have to answer. They can let me know about emergencies. (OK, it doesn't particularly affect the number of parties.=)
I'm not disagreeing with your point: people shouting into the phone in the train, talking in the middle of a movie, or endangering traffic are rude and even dangerous. But it's not the phone; people need to learn their manners, turn the ring off, excuse themselves from company to communicate.
I'm also not saying the technology couldn't make it even easier to be polite. A single-touch button to transfer calls silently to the answering service, filters for emergency messages, a protocol for forcing silent mode in authenticated locations...
Zappers and scramblers? Talk about rude. I'm just waiting for the first law suit following a death due to a failed emergency call. It'll happen in the US, btw.
Come, now. Of course the officials have been educated. They _know_ that all those nasty terrorists use multiplayer net games to chat about their next bombing and practice tactics during relaxing sessions of CounterStrike slaughter or Starcraft mayhem. (They also use custom encrypting game clients and on-the-fly steganography engines to embed bomb maps into their game graphics, of course)
Hey, these guys were networking - they just had to be up to no good!
This thinking always strikes me as odd. How many healthy Hawkings have been lost in wars? How many healthy Hawkings never got their chance due to dysfunctional families, sickness, disinterest, poorness?
If you base your protestation on the potential of genius, or, indeed, the potential of any quality at all, you should pine for all the potential that never bloomed, be the loss by accident or by euthanasia. Extending the line of logic, we should demand ending all wars (basis: loss of potential) and redistribution of wealth to third world countries (who knows how many geniuses are lost to malnutrition, disease, insufficient education...). There is nothing wrong (or right) with the demands as such; it's just that basing them on the premise of unknown talent that just might, conceivably, exist or come to exist somewhere isn't a sound argument.
The ethics of terminating the life of a person or a newly born infant is a separate matter, well worth discussion. Personally, I'm glad to see people think for a change. =)
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> I was looking into projectors as well, but
> discovered a big drawback: the bulbs are good for
> about 2000 hours and then run about $350 (on
> average) for a new one. That's a lot of money
> every couple of years...
Um... the way I look at it, I could've paid about 3000e for a puny 30-40" wide screen TV, or 2-3 times as much for a plasma display (and that's still pretty nasty to lug around), or about 2000e plus 350e every two years for a small, light unit that gives me a wallful of eye candy. By the time the price gets even, i'll be changing equipment anyway.
Your prices in the US will vary, but the proportions shouldn't be too far off.
(And why isn't this bloody thing accepting ISO-8859-15 euro chars?)
> A piece of sensible legislation.
.fi is not a pathfinder. Haven't the other Nordic countries and Canada been pretty progressive?
> It's high time other countries followed soot.
Some countries already did. (They got lost in the chimney. Others followed suit. Well, actually, they sort of took the lead in the matter. Not to belittle NZ, though - the legally required disabling of region control in DVD players was great.)
This is a perfect example of scare tactics of the music industry. Making copies of video/audio (for personal use, where "personal" means you and your immediate family) has long been legal in Finland. In fact, this right extends to making a copy or two of borrowed material, be it from a friend or from a library.
As inconceivable as it is to the RIA* noisemakers, the movie and music publishers are in perfect health and seem to be making a tidy profit even in this land of moral decay.
Caveat: to compensate for this, there is a fee on recordable media. This would be sort of OK, but the folks supposedly distributing the fees among copyright holders aren't all that forthcoming with their policies, and this is the same bunch of RIAA equivalents that want fees from kindergarten classes singing copyrighted christmas songs and taxis with the radio playing.
Current legislators don't seem to be quite as savvy when it comes to cultural wealth: software copies are restricted to a single backup, and opening DRMS'ed content is now illegal, if I remember recent developments correctly. No doubt the media companies lobby effectively even here.
By the way, I'm fairly certain
Bah. They deserve what they get for replacing the standardized pigeon carrier and substituting with parrots.
Then again, using fault-tolerant albatross carrier for extreme weather conditions might have merit...
It's not yourself speaking you want to visualize - it's your environment. I personally think that transmitting a photo of your beach vacation is silly, but on-the-fly image recognition, OCR, and translation services could actually have something in them. The phone-camera combination is your light-weight client, and the hard processing is done remotely, probably as a pay service.
I personally wouldn't mind having a huge, convenient visual dictionary available. Point, shoot, wait, and read:
"The Sydney opera house, built in blah blah, Press 'more' for further information."
"The object you are looking at is a Bengalese tiger. Run."
Come to think of it - Google, need a project manager for this? ;)
> Strangely enough it's all contained on packets with a size of 1/2 human genome...
It's called lossy compression, and they do all sorts of optimizations to achieve that.
The quality of the duplicate is never comparable to the original.
Of course, a lot depends on the codec of the reproduction implementation; some produce better results than others. You probably want to read through tests (try Google) before deciding on the one you want.
> Cell phones are the death of gentility and manners.
You've got cause and effect mixed up. Cell phones reveal
the lack of gentility and manners. Cell phones make the idiot
audible.
> I carry a pager. I don't have to answer. I still get to friends and parties. They can even let me know if it is an emergency.
I carry a phone. I don't have to answer. They can let me know about
emergencies. (OK, it doesn't particularly affect the number of parties.=)
I'm not disagreeing with your point: people shouting into the phone in the train,
talking in the middle of a movie, or endangering traffic are rude and even dangerous.
But it's not the phone; people need to learn their manners, turn the ring off, excuse
themselves from company to communicate.
I'm also not saying the technology couldn't make it even easier to be polite.
A single-touch button to transfer calls silently to the answering service,
filters for emergency messages, a protocol for forcing silent mode in authenticated
locations...
Zappers and scramblers? Talk about rude. I'm just waiting for the first
law suit following a death due to a failed emergency call. It'll happen
in the US, btw.
Come, now. Of course the officials have been educated. They _know_ that all those nasty terrorists use multiplayer net games to chat about their next bombing and practice tactics during relaxing sessions of CounterStrike slaughter or Starcraft mayhem. (They also use custom encrypting game clients and on-the-fly steganography engines to embed bomb maps into their game graphics, of course)
Hey, these guys were networking - they just had to be up to no good!
> If Stephen Hawking was euthanized as a child...
This thinking always strikes me as odd. How many healthy Hawkings have been lost in wars? How many healthy Hawkings never got their chance due to dysfunctional families, sickness, disinterest, poorness?
If you base your protestation on the potential of genius, or, indeed, the potential of any quality at all, you should pine for all the potential that never bloomed, be the loss by accident or by euthanasia. Extending the line of logic, we should demand ending all wars (basis: loss of potential) and redistribution of wealth to third world countries (who knows how many geniuses are lost to malnutrition, disease, insufficient education...). There is nothing wrong (or right) with the demands as such; it's just that basing them on the premise of unknown talent that just might, conceivably, exist or come to exist somewhere isn't a sound argument.
The ethics of terminating the life of a person or a newly born infant is a separate matter, well worth discussion.
Personally, I'm glad to see people think for a change. =)