At the risk of overposting in this story, Video glasses generally have horrible "real" resolution, and rely upon an idealized face and idealized viewing positions / angles. In practice, their a blurry PITA to try to keep in the exact right position for even remotely viewable video, let alone 1080p levels. And, as an added bonus, they seem to make you more nauseous than normal 3D glasses.
Having worked with CRT HDTV's before, I have to recommend against them. Most CRT HDTV's are either natively Interlaced or Progressive, and definitely suffer from standard CRT picture drift off of the screen. These are why title safe areas still exist. Also, most CRT HDTV's max out at 1080i. For gaming, even when being fed a clean signal at a full 1080i, cheap LCD's are still much sharper. And the last CRT HDTV I worked with weighed in at 200 lbs.
They're nice in theory, but don't bother. Just get an LCD, and accept the fixed resolutioneyness of it.
Not to stick my head into a discussion where it isn't needed, but I've been indecisively in the market for a new TV for a few years now.
First I just wanted an LCDTV of any size with a reasonable refresh rate for less than 800 dollars. Someone gave me an old CRT of theirs when they upgraded, and it works just fine. Then I was looking for a 32" 720p LCDTV for 800 dollars or so, which was reasonable last year. I just looked this past weekend, and it was possible to pick up a 45' 1080p LCDTV for 450 dollars, or a name brand one with a lovely saturated image for 650.
A 45" 1080p TV 3 years ago wouldn't have gone for less than 2k dollars, and the pictures were much worse.
Grandparent seems to imply that there is one price for all TV's, and that they all have to be expensive. That's just not true. The "high end" (of whatever) is going to be expensive, but in this case last year's high end is this year's moderate price, and last years moderate price is this year's commodity item. And yes, if you're an early adopter in heart but not in wallet this can be a problem. But in 10 years when autostereoscopic 3DTV's hit $450 bucks (if it happens), I'll be happy for the early adopters who worked out the kinks.
For the record, I've bought music over the years, which I've then subsequently had to pirate for use in players other than the designated "official" player. MP3 DJ tables, music imported to home movies, old MP3 CD players in cars... It all needs to just work, and the only format that just works is MP3 without DRM.
Adding restrictions to content literally drives legitimate purchasers to pirate sites.
The internet has been around for 15 years at this point. At first it was understandable the large swaths of people who just couldn't grasp how it works.
But by now everyone should at least have some sense for it, especially policy makers. At this point, it's like saying you don't understand these "horseless carriage" things, and that you should be required to feed them once a day.
Mod Parent Up. I can't tell you the number of "HD" consumer grade camcorders I've seen that output the requisite number of pixels, but they're so noisy and flat with improper color separation that you might as well be grabbing video in 320x240 and upscaling to 1080p. In fact, not seeing what the insides of these camcorders look like, that's what they may very well be doing.
Most DVD's look amazing on high end TV's, and that's because the original SD signal is so clean and crisp. HD level consumer camcorders don't seem to get anywhere near the visual output level of a professional SD camera. In essence, you're losing potential visual clarity (and a heck of a lot of wasted Hard Drive space) so that you can slap an HD logo on it.
Digital still cameras seem to have abated on the whole "I have more megapixels than you" war, and now are competing more on actual visual clarity. I can't wait until camcorders achieve the same thing.
The technology you're looking for is called "Shutter Glasses". They've been around since the mid 80's (including being an accessory for the Sega Master System).
They work by blocking one eye, then the other. It effectively halves your monitor refresh rate, as you have to display each frame twice (120 goes to a normal 60, 60 goes to 30), as well as your overall graphics output.
Quite frankly, any polarized glasses TV display device really has to be compared against LCD shutter glasses technology in terms of likelyhood of adoption. This technology has been cheap and effective since the 80's, and since the mid 90's has even been completely wireless. Really, the only differences between a polarized TV display and an LCD shutter glasses display are A: the polarized TV display has somewhat lighter glasses with no battery, and B: the LCD display is about one tenth the cost, utilizing reliable existing technology.
I'm guessing that we'll be at the 3D display technology level sometime, perhaps after we have run through the HDTV adoption course. But it just won't involve glasses. People don't seem to like their media quite that much.
The problem you bring up has to very important associated numbers.
1. The number of Humans. 2. The number of Humans the earth can support.
The advancement of energy and other technologies attempts to address the second number. By increasing the number of people this planet can support, we can in general keep more people alive and content. This will prevent wars, increase our overall pool of knowledge, and increase the chances that we'd find further optimizations or ways to support more human beings.
The number of Humans, however, is incredibly hard for us to manage. Remember, China has had some of the most intense rules about breeding under one of the most oppressive current worldly regimes, and has seen tremendous population growth anyway. Finding ways to support more life on the planet may be significantly cheaper and easier at this part of the curve than fighting against the most basic biological urge of all animals. And you forget another important factor: It's not like we'll get slapped with an overdraft fee once the number of humans on the planet exceeds the number of humans that the earth can support. The amount of people the earth can support is basically defined as the point where we can't get more people out there. As people ourselves, we can attempt to make that as painless a process as possible, but it's not up to us to police it.
And if a solar updraft tower on this scale is proven to be viable, producing no greenhouse gases, nuclear waste, or other polluting waste materials, it could greatly help reduce our inevitable march to climate change disaster, including how we reclaim waste ground-level heat.
The desert of Arizona isn't a wasteland. But I'll be damned if there isn't a heck of a lot of it left. And unlike forests, we don't really rely upon them as heavily for our survival.
Music companies would love nothing more than to make lots of money. If DRM suits that purpose, then yes, they're for it. It seems, however, that DRM inhibits sales without actually combating privacy, and that consumers won't rent music unless it's (by their standards) undervalued.
And yes, the music companies want to retain control and maximize profits. But realize that whatever move they make next, it won't be specifically to push DRM, but whatever pushes their income.
I had one state (Virginia, I believe), track me down after 6 years for a balance left in a former employer's pay system. I was surprised at the tenacity of the government in a case like this. They didn't just grab the money an run, like some other commenters here seem to imply.
You can get commercially available unlocked iphones. They just cost so much that nobody does it.
Apparently people would rather spend less money up front, and more money in the long run. Either people's budgets are so precariously balanced that an upfront fee is unviable, or humans are just bad at math. Possibly both.
That sounds like an issue from the phone company's lines to the backbone provider. They probably have a single oversubscribed T1 or (gulp) a pair of ISDN's going upstream.
Either way, that's pretty inexcusable. All things considered, with the bandwidth that a 56k really doesn't take up, the only reason for keeping a single oversubscribed upstream line like that is they know you have no alternatives. Even basic voice is supposed to be 56k or higher.
This strikes me as the sort of thing that, without excessive amounts of variation, would get filtered out quickly by the general public. Sure, a machine can write *one* story on a baseball game that is interesting to read. But after the hundredth version of the same story that you've read, the public would stop reading the text entirely and just filter for the important bits. At that point, you might as well just have a table with the interesting stats.
The challenge isn't to write one story. It's to create a machine that can write N stories that remain interesting and fresh, and with less effort and cost than it would take journalists to just write N stories the traditional way.
And, of course, open versions of Linux have been used in the past. They didn't take off. Part of the reason is because people could build and write competing systems easier, which dissuaded the investment necessary to create a truly compelling experience.
Eventually OSS will catch up, as OSS tends to do. And it will probably be more stable, reliable, and flexible than the closed-source counterparts. But don't expect that to happen right away. We're just finally getting to the era in this backwater country where "cellphone" doesn't mean "useless Nokia candybar."
At the risk of overposting in this thread, never accept a normal check for a car. You want a money order or a bank certified check (which really isn't a check at all). Accepting a normal check for a car is just asking for fraud.
When I was working retail, the only people who still used checks were the elderly. Everyone else just swiped. This seems like code for "the board will be especially concerned that the elderly and backwater can figure out this newfangled payment method." And now that I say that out loud, it sounds like a potshot at Americans.
Most major banks here in the US finally do let you setup automatic monthly transfers at no charge.
Oddly enough, though, they hide the fact that they're doing electronic transfers. At the three banks I've used, you can have them mail checks to anyone, but some of the larger potential recipients get that money instantly without paper. An "Instant Check," if you will.
But they all still want between 8 and 20 dollars to do a manual electronic transfer to someone else's bank. Of course, it's free to pull in a transfer *from* someone else's bank.
You want at least a certified money order for a car. Unless, of course, you're willing to take on faith that the person taking your 10,000 dollar vehicle isn't scamming you.
I don't know. Countries are pretty good about extraditing murder suspects.
'Team X can fly in, talk to the police here, poke around, and report their findings." That doesn't sound too controversial or hard to pass as a first step. Then when that works out, add allow them to pull in the local police to make the arrest, and you have a nice, tidy system.
IANAL, but... Scanning books is a form of copying. Converting OCRed text into an audio book is a form of creating a derivative work. Both of these fall under the purvey of copyright law, and may or may not fall under fair use. It may be the sort of thing that you could fight and win in court, but you'd probably have to fight. And, of course, if the original poster explicitly created this machine because textbooks are expensive, then the "significant non-infringing uses" defense is definitely lower.
Using a book for toilet paper, however, is not something that publishers can stop you from doing. Considering the quality of most college textbooks, it might be their best use.
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At the risk of overposting in this story, Video glasses generally have horrible "real" resolution, and rely upon an idealized face and idealized viewing positions / angles. In practice, their a blurry PITA to try to keep in the exact right position for even remotely viewable video, let alone 1080p levels. And, as an added bonus, they seem to make you more nauseous than normal 3D glasses.
3D simply won't become mainstream until they can pull it off without glasses. The only question, is that even possible?
yes... Though if you've seen it in person, it is finicky.
Sega sold them domestically (US) in 1988 for the Master System. That's 22 years ago now, at mass market, for 50 bucks.
http://everything2.com/title/SegaScope+3D+Glasses
30" LCD HDTV? Try $330. This isn't a special sale, this is just the first link that I found off Amazon.
http://tinyurl.com/ybgybxu
Having worked with CRT HDTV's before, I have to recommend against them. Most CRT HDTV's are either natively Interlaced or Progressive, and definitely suffer from standard CRT picture drift off of the screen. These are why title safe areas still exist. Also, most CRT HDTV's max out at 1080i. For gaming, even when being fed a clean signal at a full 1080i, cheap LCD's are still much sharper. And the last CRT HDTV I worked with weighed in at 200 lbs.
They're nice in theory, but don't bother. Just get an LCD, and accept the fixed resolutioneyness of it.
Not to stick my head into a discussion where it isn't needed, but I've been indecisively in the market for a new TV for a few years now.
First I just wanted an LCDTV of any size with a reasonable refresh rate for less than 800 dollars. Someone gave me an old CRT of theirs when they upgraded, and it works just fine. Then I was looking for a 32" 720p LCDTV for 800 dollars or so, which was reasonable last year. I just looked this past weekend, and it was possible to pick up a 45' 1080p LCDTV for 450 dollars, or a name brand one with a lovely saturated image for 650.
A 45" 1080p TV 3 years ago wouldn't have gone for less than 2k dollars, and the pictures were much worse.
Grandparent seems to imply that there is one price for all TV's, and that they all have to be expensive. That's just not true. The "high end" (of whatever) is going to be expensive, but in this case last year's high end is this year's moderate price, and last years moderate price is this year's commodity item. And yes, if you're an early adopter in heart but not in wallet this can be a problem. But in 10 years when autostereoscopic 3DTV's hit $450 bucks (if it happens), I'll be happy for the early adopters who worked out the kinks.
For the record, I've bought music over the years, which I've then subsequently had to pirate for use in players other than the designated "official" player. MP3 DJ tables, music imported to home movies, old MP3 CD players in cars... It all needs to just work, and the only format that just works is MP3 without DRM.
Adding restrictions to content literally drives legitimate purchasers to pirate sites.
The internet has been around for 15 years at this point. At first it was understandable the large swaths of people who just couldn't grasp how it works.
But by now everyone should at least have some sense for it, especially policy makers. At this point, it's like saying you don't understand these "horseless carriage" things, and that you should be required to feed them once a day.
Mod Parent Up. I can't tell you the number of "HD" consumer grade camcorders I've seen that output the requisite number of pixels, but they're so noisy and flat with improper color separation that you might as well be grabbing video in 320x240 and upscaling to 1080p. In fact, not seeing what the insides of these camcorders look like, that's what they may very well be doing.
Most DVD's look amazing on high end TV's, and that's because the original SD signal is so clean and crisp. HD level consumer camcorders don't seem to get anywhere near the visual output level of a professional SD camera. In essence, you're losing potential visual clarity (and a heck of a lot of wasted Hard Drive space) so that you can slap an HD logo on it.
Digital still cameras seem to have abated on the whole "I have more megapixels than you" war, and now are competing more on actual visual clarity. I can't wait until camcorders achieve the same thing.
The technology you're looking for is called "Shutter Glasses". They've been around since the mid 80's (including being an accessory for the Sega Master System).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCD_shutter_glasses
They work by blocking one eye, then the other. It effectively halves your monitor refresh rate, as you have to display each frame twice (120 goes to a normal 60, 60 goes to 30), as well as your overall graphics output.
Quite frankly, any polarized glasses TV display device really has to be compared against LCD shutter glasses technology in terms of likelyhood of adoption. This technology has been cheap and effective since the 80's, and since the mid 90's has even been completely wireless. Really, the only differences between a polarized TV display and an LCD shutter glasses display are A: the polarized TV display has somewhat lighter glasses with no battery, and B: the LCD display is about one tenth the cost, utilizing reliable existing technology.
I'm guessing that we'll be at the 3D display technology level sometime, perhaps after we have run through the HDTV adoption course. But it just won't involve glasses. People don't seem to like their media quite that much.
The problem you bring up has to very important associated numbers.
1. The number of Humans.
2. The number of Humans the earth can support.
The advancement of energy and other technologies attempts to address the second number. By increasing the number of people this planet can support, we can in general keep more people alive and content. This will prevent wars, increase our overall pool of knowledge, and increase the chances that we'd find further optimizations or ways to support more human beings.
The number of Humans, however, is incredibly hard for us to manage. Remember, China has had some of the most intense rules about breeding under one of the most oppressive current worldly regimes, and has seen tremendous population growth anyway. Finding ways to support more life on the planet may be significantly cheaper and easier at this part of the curve than fighting against the most basic biological urge of all animals. And you forget another important factor: It's not like we'll get slapped with an overdraft fee once the number of humans on the planet exceeds the number of humans that the earth can support. The amount of people the earth can support is basically defined as the point where we can't get more people out there. As people ourselves, we can attempt to make that as painless a process as possible, but it's not up to us to police it.
And if a solar updraft tower on this scale is proven to be viable, producing no greenhouse gases, nuclear waste, or other polluting waste materials, it could greatly help reduce our inevitable march to climate change disaster, including how we reclaim waste ground-level heat.
The desert of Arizona isn't a wasteland. But I'll be damned if there isn't a heck of a lot of it left. And unlike forests, we don't really rely upon them as heavily for our survival.
Good luck making 2,560 2,400 foot chimmneys.
Music companies would love nothing more than to make lots of money. If DRM suits that purpose, then yes, they're for it. It seems, however, that DRM inhibits sales without actually combating privacy, and that consumers won't rent music unless it's (by their standards) undervalued.
And yes, the music companies want to retain control and maximize profits. But realize that whatever move they make next, it won't be specifically to push DRM, but whatever pushes their income.
I had one state (Virginia, I believe), track me down after 6 years for a balance left in a former employer's pay system. I was surprised at the tenacity of the government in a case like this. They didn't just grab the money an run, like some other commenters here seem to imply.
You can get commercially available unlocked iphones. They just cost so much that nobody does it.
Apparently people would rather spend less money up front, and more money in the long run. Either people's budgets are so precariously balanced that an upfront fee is unviable, or humans are just bad at math. Possibly both.
That sounds like an issue from the phone company's lines to the backbone provider. They probably have a single oversubscribed T1 or (gulp) a pair of ISDN's going upstream.
Either way, that's pretty inexcusable. All things considered, with the bandwidth that a 56k really doesn't take up, the only reason for keeping a single oversubscribed upstream line like that is they know you have no alternatives. Even basic voice is supposed to be 56k or higher.
This strikes me as the sort of thing that, without excessive amounts of variation, would get filtered out quickly by the general public. Sure, a machine can write *one* story on a baseball game that is interesting to read. But after the hundredth version of the same story that you've read, the public would stop reading the text entirely and just filter for the important bits. At that point, you might as well just have a table with the interesting stats.
The challenge isn't to write one story. It's to create a machine that can write N stories that remain interesting and fresh, and with less effort and cost than it would take journalists to just write N stories the traditional way.
And, of course, open versions of Linux have been used in the past. They didn't take off. Part of the reason is because people could build and write competing systems easier, which dissuaded the investment necessary to create a truly compelling experience.
Eventually OSS will catch up, as OSS tends to do. And it will probably be more stable, reliable, and flexible than the closed-source counterparts. But don't expect that to happen right away. We're just finally getting to the era in this backwater country where "cellphone" doesn't mean "useless Nokia candybar."
At the risk of overposting in this thread, never accept a normal check for a car. You want a money order or a bank certified check (which really isn't a check at all). Accepting a normal check for a car is just asking for fraud.
When I was working retail, the only people who still used checks were the elderly. Everyone else just swiped. This seems like code for "the board will be especially concerned that the elderly and backwater can figure out this newfangled payment method." And now that I say that out loud, it sounds like a potshot at Americans.
Most major banks here in the US finally do let you setup automatic monthly transfers at no charge.
Oddly enough, though, they hide the fact that they're doing electronic transfers. At the three banks I've used, you can have them mail checks to anyone, but some of the larger potential recipients get that money instantly without paper. An "Instant Check," if you will.
But they all still want between 8 and 20 dollars to do a manual electronic transfer to someone else's bank. Of course, it's free to pull in a transfer *from* someone else's bank.
You want at least a certified money order for a car. Unless, of course, you're willing to take on faith that the person taking your 10,000 dollar vehicle isn't scamming you.
I don't know. Countries are pretty good about extraditing murder suspects.
'Team X can fly in, talk to the police here, poke around, and report their findings." That doesn't sound too controversial or hard to pass as a first step. Then when that works out, add allow them to pull in the local police to make the arrest, and you have a nice, tidy system.
IANAL, but... Scanning books is a form of copying. Converting OCRed text into an audio book is a form of creating a derivative work. Both of these fall under the purvey of copyright law, and may or may not fall under fair use. It may be the sort of thing that you could fight and win in court, but you'd probably have to fight. And, of course, if the original poster explicitly created this machine because textbooks are expensive, then the "significant non-infringing uses" defense is definitely lower.
Using a book for toilet paper, however, is not something that publishers can stop you from doing. Considering the quality of most college textbooks, it might be their best use.