Conservatives believe what's good for the corporations is good for everyone. Liberals believe that what is good for the people is good for everyone. Strong IP laws favour the big companies - weak IP laws favour the little guy more.
Big companies are certainly taking advantage of our copyright, patent, and trademark systems, and they are pushing for legislation more in their favor.
However, I--a liberal--disagree with the idea that these systems are fundamentally biased toward the corps over individuals. I don't believe there is anything wrong with the ideas of systems, although there are problems with the current implementation.
I've earned my living writing software and a tiny bit of other writing (of which I hope to do more). Copyrights, whether held by my employers or by myself, have made my work fungible. While there may be ways for me to earn a living with these skills in a copyright-free universe, we don't live in such. If you want to work toward such a universe, then you need to find a migration path to new economic models that would allow everyone who earns a living this way to still earn a living (possibly in another line of work).
Copyrights do help the little guy. I can send manuscripts to agents and publishers for consideration without worry that they're going to publish my work without compensation. No, I don't write to get rich, but I do want to be published. Without copyright, I doubt there would be publishers willing to risk there capital to publish my work. Sure I could self-publish, but that takes investment capital that I don't have.
My employer pays me for code I write, because there's no free source alternative that meets their requirements. Not all of the thousands and thousands of today's programmers could eek out an existence supporting open source. (Mind you, I have no problem with such an approach, but I think it should live side-by-side with traditional models.)
DMCA is evil. DRM is stupid. RIAA is a bunch of jerks. The "originality" bar for patents is too low. Business methods are too ephemeral for patent protection. Protections for copyright and patents are too long. Lawyers and our litigious society make patents too expensive for the little guy. Fair use is critically important but vanishing.
But all of that is fixable without nixing the ideas of copyright, patent, and trademark systems.
Well, maybe the RIAA would still be a bunch of jerks.
Now, the word "theft" is the word I object. One cannot steal an idea, one cannot steal the text of a book, one cannot steal the image of a mouse. Even if it is copied and the copy is somehow proven to impact the sales payable to the original creator, it is not theft.
True, in a legal sense, plagiarism and copyright infringement aren't "theft" or "stealing." But in non-legalese, there is quite a precedent for applying these terms.
We can say nothing but what hath been said. Our poets
steal from Homer.... Our story-dressers do as much; he that comes last is commonly best. --Robert Burton (1577-1640)
About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to
steal with good judgment. --Josh Billings (1818-1885)
They copied all they could follow
but they couldn't copy my mind
so I left them sweating and stealing
a year and a half behind.
--Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
If you
steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research.
--Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)
There is software to do what you describe. Do a web search for "simplified English software". Simplified English may be more extreme than you want, but it has the same goals. The idea is to use a fixed vocabulary and to remove ambiguity by requiring each word to be exactly one definition and one part of speech. Software can check documents to make sure you've followed these rules.
Hell, do they even know that D.C. isn't a state, it's a special district with it's own government?
I just read Deception Point by Dan Brown, and I cringed when one of the characters wonders "how many state and federal laws" she's violating by breaking into a government office in Washington, D.C. Ugh!
The moon and the sun are also (usually) rendered with lowercase letters. That always struck me as odd. Is Earth the name of the planet or not? Can a Mars probe dig into the earth of the red planet?
Do sci-fi writers end up using names like Sol, Terra, and Luna just so they capitalize them consistently along with the names of the rest of the celestial bodies?
This isn't true: color slide film uses three layers, just like monitors do.
I think the article's point was that film has a smoother continuum. In digital monitors, you have a discrete (integral) values of your three primaries. With film, it's closer to having a continuous range of your three primaries. Imagine your RGB values being represented by a decimal number rather than an integer. True, down at the quantum level, it's still discreet, but we're talking about a much better approximation to reality. ILM and others have been pushing for a more bits-per-channel for RGB data, since 8 is too limiting. High end equipment can do 10-12 bits per primary, and that's almost enough to fool the eye into seeing continuous tones.
But I think the real reason this expanded gamut technique is compared to film is that film's high and low limits are more extreme than most display technologies. So you still get a triangular subset of the visible gamut, but it's a larger triangle. (See the photo linked from the story to see the triangle to gamut comparison.)
Without the Sono Bono copyright extension, Mickey Mouse would not have entered the public domain.
That sentence is incorrect. Words like "Windows" and "Apple" are in the public domain, even though they're also trademarked in some contexts. "Public Domain" is not applicable to trademarks one way or the other.
I was referring to a graphical depiction of the character, not his name. His image is trademarked.
It's only trademark infringement if you induce consumer confusion as to the provider of a good. Slapping "Not authorized by or affliated with the Walt Disney Corporation" on top will keep you perfectly protected.
Not "perfectly". The earlier story about the activist who used fallwell.com had a disclaimer that his site was not affiliated with Jerry Falwell Ministries. It did not protect him from a trademark infringement. In fact, I've read that putting such a disclaimer on your product may open you up to "willfill infringement" damages, since you are acknowledging that there was the potential for confusion.
If you created and distributed a new cartoon featuring Mickey Mouse, Disney could easily claim that the use of their valuable trademark (the image) in the product confuses customers into thinking it's a Disney product. That's the entire point of trademark law.
Disney could make the same trademark argument you did, but the author could respond that (a) the company is "Disney", not "Mickey Mouse",...
But the image of Mickey Mouse is one of the strongest brands out there. People associate the character with Disney. Except for counterfeit goods, you can be certain that any produce with the mouse is from Disney or authorized by Disney.
Words, by their nature, are weaker marks. So the "unauthorized" book examples probably you gave have a lower standard when distinguishing themselves from the trademark holders. And, I'd bet that, in most cases, the "unauthorized" books are cleared by the original trademark owners. (Publishers are careful and will usually seek explicit permission, even for things like short quotations which clearly fall under the docterine of fair use. I know that's a copyright issue, not a trademark one, but it's an example of how careful they play it.) I worked for a software company that makes a popular shrink-wrap app. We always found out about "unauthorized" guides before they were published. Eventually we contracted with one of the authors to write the "official" guide.
Regardless, the point of my post was that the Steamboat Willie example is a poor choice when arguing against copyright extension. The trademark issue and the fact that there are newer Mickey Mouse cartoons from Disney clouds the argument. It's not clear how the courts would rule. You and I have just demonstrated that there are plausible arguments on both sides.
I don't know of a better example off hand to use instead, but I wish I had one. I want a clear-cut example I can hold up as an example of a significant work that would have been completely unencumbered had its copyright not been extended.
Those of us who are arguing for revisions of copyright law need to stop using Mickey Mouse as the example. Without the Sono Bono copyright extension, Mickey Mouse would not have entered the public domain. The cartoon the Mickey debuted in, Steamboat Willie, would have entered the public domain, not the mouse himself.
What's the difference? Well, for one, Mickey Mouse is also protected as a trademark. If Steamboat Willie had become public domain, then you could have probably distributed copies of the original cartoon or used small bits of it in a larger work without getting Disney's approval. But you'd quickly be in hot water if you created and distributed a "new" Mickey Mouse cartoon, since Disney could rightly argue that you're infringing their trademark.
Furthermore, Disney could claim that a new Mickey Mouse cartoon is a derivative of one of their more recent Mickey Mouse cartoons that is still within the copyright period. I suppose this would be a gray area. I've never heard a discussion of how copyright terms apply to a series of works that are derivatives of each other. Certainly the newer works are entitled to their full copyright term even after the original one expires. So unless the hypothetical new cartoon was demonstrably a derivative solely of Steamboat Willie and nothing newer, Disney could make a case.
I'm guessing the ruling hinged on the subtle point that the activist was using his site to make money (by selling a book). If the site were strictly political speech (or a parody), I doubt he would have lost.
But intentionally infringing on someone's trademark (by using a confusingly similar mark) to sell a product is pretty clear cut. At least on the surface.
OK, I think this is cool. But I have a pet peeve with people calling something like this "a technology." Isn't it really just an application of technology? Or a technique, or a method, or a system? Calling something a technology has become a cliche that immediately connotes--for me anyway--something that its overhyped. Like "an historical event" or "a software engineer." It's press release hyperbole.
Or am I just jaded?
This technique is a refinement of other systems that project on curved surfaces or correct alignment or create seamless panoramas using multiple projectors.
It seems like with this "keyboard" you'd have to have your fingers curved and somewhat tensed to hold the controller at all times.
Actually, the text says that you squeeze it between your palms, so your fingers don't carry the weight at all. It also seems you could rest the thing on your desktop or knees and just balance it with your palms.
I read a funny password anecdote (maybe from Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls). A user rushed into his cube, quickly typed his credentials, and was told that his password was invalid. He sat down, entered his password again, and it was fine. Curious, he logged out, stood up, and tried again. No access. When he was standing up, logging in always failed. When he was seated, he always succeeded.
How could the computer possibly know whether he was standing or sitting?
It turns out that somebody had switched a couple of the (physical) keys on his keyboard as a joke. When the user was standing at the keyboard, he used "hunt-and-peck" typing. When he was seated, he was touch typing.
VMS had a password generator that made nonsense words that were (supposedly) pronounceable and thus memorable. As a result of the algorithm, it would often pick a real word (or a real word plus some extra syllables). Sometimes, the real word would be offensive.
So the folks at DEC kindly put a naughty word filter into the generator (in many languages). But then there was the risk that people perusing the source code (it was available on microfiche) could be offended if they stumbled upong the naughty word table.
So the folks at DEC obfuscated the naughty word table with something trivial like ROT13.
That inevitably led to somebody circulating a program to decode the naughty word table, and a Usenet thread that taught us how to cuss in a dozen languages.
Modern video projectors are much, much brighter than 35 mm slide projectors ever were. You can get a couple of thousand lumens out of a box you can fit in your briefcase, and the large venue projectors toss out 17,000 lumens or so.
Perhaps the pro video projectors are, but most consumer grade and conference room projectors have only recently caught up to a Kodak Ektagraphic projector. Both are in the 1000 to 1300 lumen range for comparable screen sizes according to most of the specs I've seen. A 35mm slide projector does that fairly efficiently with a $14 bulb. Video projectors have much more powerful (and expensive) bulbs to make up for the lower efficiency in the optical path (though DLP is much better than LCD).
The slides are much brighter and crisper than the video in every planetarium presentation I've ever seen. Planetariums are also big users of the gradient-edges for hidden seams trick. Skyskan makes software for producing overlapping panoramas and "all-dome" shows using slides and/or video.
Precise alignment is usually possible, but having a greater tolerance means less effort and cost in setup and maintenance. The amount you need to shift a projector depends greatly on the throw distance. Granted, for rear projection, this is usually limited. But in front projection you're often shooting quite a distance with long-throw lenses.
I'd hardly call this "innovative" or even label it as a "technology." It's a standard multi-image slide show trick that probably goes back at least to the 1960s. (It was old hat when I did it in 1989.) It has been done with movie projection and is routinely done with video projection (see Dataton WatchOut).
The trick is to have some overlap between the projection areas, and to use complementary gradient filters at the overlapping edges. The gradient filters can hide seams that even the slightest misalignment would cause.
There was a graduate student (at CMU?) who made a nifty program that could compensate for alignment problems. The projectors could be crudely aligned, then grids were displayed on each one. A PC cam captured the grids, computed the offset, tilt, and keystoning. From that information a reverse transform was applied to each projector's output, and you got a remarkably well aligned multi-projector image. Very impressive, since the cam was obviously much lower in resolution than the composite image.
Multi-projector techniques are even more important with video than they were with slides, since the light output of video projectors is so much lower. To throw a big image, combining multiple projectors is the most practical option.
As I understand it, only a tiny part of our retinas (the fovea?) have a high density of receptors (rods and/or cones?) and thus can "see" high resolution. The rest of the retina has a lower density of receptors that's good at detecting change, motion, certain colors, and general lighting conditions, but are generally not sharp enough for things like reading.
So my question is, is the high-density zone in a well defined spot? Or does it vary by individual? For example, could somebody's fovea (if that's the right term) be offset a little so that what they're focused on is not what's dead center in their pupil? I know blind spots (where the optic nerves attach) are in different places from eye to eye. Could the blind spot be dead center?
And there's the issue of dominant eye, too, right? The dominant eye tends to line things up, and the other comes along for the ride. In the article there's an example of somebody lining up a pool shot, but that might look pretty different from his/her other eye.
Despite the naysayers here, you could be on to something.
A DLP projector uses a "white" bulb and reflects the light through red, green, and blue filters. The filters (ideally) are band pass filters, allowing only a fraction of the light to pass, and absorbing the rest, which must be reradiated as heat.
If our light source was "tuned" to put most of its power out in the bands used by the filters, then a lot less light would wasted. So if you could make your light source from properly tuned and bright red, green, and blue LEDs, it would be much more efficient, requiring less power and creating less heat. I'm sure the details of this make it hard to solve, but in theory it would be a great solution.
[Are LEDs different colors because of the filtering of the packaging or because they're tuned to produce different wavelengths of light?]
DLP projectors have two basic designs. Most reflect the light off the mirror matrix and through a rotating wheel of red, green, and blue filters. Some high end ones start with three light sources (or a single source that's split with prisms). The three light sources are filtered and then bounced off independent mirror matrixes and recombined with prisms.
Both of these could benefit from an LED approach. With a single matrix, you could get rid of the mechanical color wheel by strobing the LEDs instead (switch them on and off in R-G-B sequence). I believe, (though I'm not certain) that LEDs turn on and off very quickly. With three matrixes, you simply start with three different light sources, rather than splitting a single source and losing heat.
I'm sure there are many electrical and optical challenges with this approach. If they can be solved, you could make very robust, quiet, long-life, low-power DLP displays.
And a vote for Kerry won't change anything either.
The biggest issue here in my mind is who you would rather have appointing Supreme Court Justices at this point. I believe that'll have a much bigger long-term impact than anything else in the next presidential term.
The laws and banks are better at handling fraud on the debit cards, but a big problem remains: you end up bouncing checks elsewhere.
A former boss of mine discovered fraud on his debit card when his mortgage payment bounced along with several of his other monthly bills. So, although he was able to get reimbursed for the fraudulent charges (a couple thousand dollars of computer equipment shipped to an abandoned house), he was blacklisted as a "bad check writer" and he had to pay late fees for his mortgage and other bills that had bounced. Some of his utilities required a security deposit from that point on.
If you are still using AT&T for home phone service, you deserve what you get.... There are soooo many better deals available, why would you even want to use AT&T?
Nearly all of my long-distance calls are in state, which means $0.10 per minute. Period. I got the same quote from several providers. When I asked if they had calling plans for cheaper rates, they all said "not in state." Due to regulations, there simply isn't a better rate available for in-state long distance on a land line. Allegedly there are some 10-10 numbers that can do better, but I didn't want to mess with them. Since I have always received excellent service from AT&T, I stuck with them.
the only major browser that doesn't support it happens to account for over 90% of the user base.
I'd just like to take this opportunity to point out that IE5 and IE6 together account for just over 80% of the market. (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats. asp) They're slipping!
Slashdot Mirror
Big companies are certainly taking advantage of our copyright, patent, and trademark systems, and they are pushing for legislation more in their favor.
However, I--a liberal--disagree with the idea that these systems are fundamentally biased toward the corps over individuals. I don't believe there is anything wrong with the ideas of systems, although there are problems with the current implementation.
I've earned my living writing software and a tiny bit of other writing (of which I hope to do more). Copyrights, whether held by my employers or by myself, have made my work fungible. While there may be ways for me to earn a living with these skills in a copyright-free universe, we don't live in such. If you want to work toward such a universe, then you need to find a migration path to new economic models that would allow everyone who earns a living this way to still earn a living (possibly in another line of work).
Copyrights do help the little guy. I can send manuscripts to agents and publishers for consideration without worry that they're going to publish my work without compensation. No, I don't write to get rich, but I do want to be published. Without copyright, I doubt there would be publishers willing to risk there capital to publish my work. Sure I could self-publish, but that takes investment capital that I don't have.
My employer pays me for code I write, because there's no free source alternative that meets their requirements. Not all of the thousands and thousands of today's programmers could eek out an existence supporting open source. (Mind you, I have no problem with such an approach, but I think it should live side-by-side with traditional models.)
DMCA is evil. DRM is stupid. RIAA is a bunch of jerks. The "originality" bar for patents is too low. Business methods are too ephemeral for patent protection. Protections for copyright and patents are too long. Lawyers and our litigious society make patents too expensive for the little guy. Fair use is critically important but vanishing.
But all of that is fixable without nixing the ideas of copyright, patent, and trademark systems.
Well, maybe the RIAA would still be a bunch of jerks.
True, in a legal sense, plagiarism and copyright infringement aren't "theft" or "stealing." But in non-legalese, there is quite a precedent for applying these terms.
That's not the point. A good code review can find ways to simplify the implementation so that there are fewer edge cases in the first place.
Grandparent poster was right: unit tests and code reviews are both important.
There is software to do what you describe. Do a web search for "simplified English software". Simplified English may be more extreme than you want, but it has the same goals. The idea is to use a fixed vocabulary and to remove ambiguity by requiring each word to be exactly one definition and one part of speech. Software can check documents to make sure you've followed these rules.
I found a good description here.
I haven't used it myself, but I've read several examples. It is indeed easy to read.
I just read Deception Point by Dan Brown, and I cringed when one of the characters wonders "how many state and federal laws" she's violating by breaking into a government office in Washington, D.C. Ugh!
Mercury, Venus, earth, Mars... Uh oh.
The moon and the sun are also (usually) rendered with lowercase letters. That always struck me as odd. Is Earth the name of the planet or not? Can a Mars probe dig into the earth of the red planet?
Do sci-fi writers end up using names like Sol, Terra, and Luna just so they capitalize them consistently along with the names of the rest of the celestial bodies?
I think the article's point was that film has a smoother continuum. In digital monitors, you have a discrete (integral) values of your three primaries. With film, it's closer to having a continuous range of your three primaries. Imagine your RGB values being represented by a decimal number rather than an integer. True, down at the quantum level, it's still discreet, but we're talking about a much better approximation to reality. ILM and others have been pushing for a more bits-per-channel for RGB data, since 8 is too limiting. High end equipment can do 10-12 bits per primary, and that's almost enough to fool the eye into seeing continuous tones.
But I think the real reason this expanded gamut technique is compared to film is that film's high and low limits are more extreme than most display technologies. So you still get a triangular subset of the visible gamut, but it's a larger triangle. (See the photo linked from the story to see the triangle to gamut comparison.)
I was referring to a graphical depiction of the character, not his name. His image is trademarked.
Not "perfectly". The earlier story about the activist who used fallwell.com had a disclaimer that his site was not affiliated with Jerry Falwell Ministries. It did not protect him from a trademark infringement. In fact, I've read that putting such a disclaimer on your product may open you up to "willfill infringement" damages, since you are acknowledging that there was the potential for confusion.
If you created and distributed a new cartoon featuring Mickey Mouse, Disney could easily claim that the use of their valuable trademark (the image) in the product confuses customers into thinking it's a Disney product. That's the entire point of trademark law.
But the image of Mickey Mouse is one of the strongest brands out there. People associate the character with Disney. Except for counterfeit goods, you can be certain that any produce with the mouse is from Disney or authorized by Disney.
Words, by their nature, are weaker marks. So the "unauthorized" book examples probably you gave have a lower standard when distinguishing themselves from the trademark holders. And, I'd bet that, in most cases, the "unauthorized" books are cleared by the original trademark owners. (Publishers are careful and will usually seek explicit permission, even for things like short quotations which clearly fall under the docterine of fair use. I know that's a copyright issue, not a trademark one, but it's an example of how careful they play it.) I worked for a software company that makes a popular shrink-wrap app. We always found out about "unauthorized" guides before they were published. Eventually we contracted with one of the authors to write the "official" guide.
Regardless, the point of my post was that the Steamboat Willie example is a poor choice when arguing against copyright extension. The trademark issue and the fact that there are newer Mickey Mouse cartoons from Disney clouds the argument. It's not clear how the courts would rule. You and I have just demonstrated that there are plausible arguments on both sides.
I don't know of a better example off hand to use instead, but I wish I had one. I want a clear-cut example I can hold up as an example of a significant work that would have been completely unencumbered had its copyright not been extended.
Those of us who are arguing for revisions of copyright law need to stop using Mickey Mouse as the example. Without the Sono Bono copyright extension, Mickey Mouse would not have entered the public domain. The cartoon the Mickey debuted in, Steamboat Willie, would have entered the public domain, not the mouse himself.
What's the difference? Well, for one, Mickey Mouse is also protected as a trademark. If Steamboat Willie had become public domain, then you could have probably distributed copies of the original cartoon or used small bits of it in a larger work without getting Disney's approval. But you'd quickly be in hot water if you created and distributed a "new" Mickey Mouse cartoon, since Disney could rightly argue that you're infringing their trademark.
Furthermore, Disney could claim that a new Mickey Mouse cartoon is a derivative of one of their more recent Mickey Mouse cartoons that is still within the copyright period. I suppose this would be a gray area. I've never heard a discussion of how copyright terms apply to a series of works that are derivatives of each other. Certainly the newer works are entitled to their full copyright term even after the original one expires. So unless the hypothetical new cartoon was demonstrably a derivative solely of Steamboat Willie and nothing newer, Disney could make a case.
I'm guessing the ruling hinged on the subtle point that the activist was using his site to make money (by selling a book). If the site were strictly political speech (or a parody), I doubt he would have lost.
But intentionally infringing on someone's trademark (by using a confusingly similar mark) to sell a product is pretty clear cut. At least on the surface.
OK, I think this is cool. But I have a pet peeve with people calling something like this "a technology." Isn't it really just an application of technology? Or a technique, or a method, or a system? Calling something a technology has become a cliche that immediately connotes--for me anyway--something that its overhyped. Like "an historical event" or "a software engineer." It's press release hyperbole.
Or am I just jaded?
This technique is a refinement of other systems that project on curved surfaces or correct alignment or create seamless panoramas using multiple projectors.
Actually, the text says that you squeeze it between your palms, so your fingers don't carry the weight at all. It also seems you could rest the thing on your desktop or knees and just balance it with your palms.
Maybe because the article already did that.
I read a funny password anecdote (maybe from Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls). A user rushed into his cube, quickly typed his credentials, and was told that his password was invalid. He sat down, entered his password again, and it was fine. Curious, he logged out, stood up, and tried again. No access. When he was standing up, logging in always failed. When he was seated, he always succeeded.
How could the computer possibly know whether he was standing or sitting?
It turns out that somebody had switched a couple of the (physical) keys on his keyboard as a joke. When the user was standing at the keyboard, he used "hunt-and-peck" typing. When he was seated, he was touch typing.
VMS had a password generator that made nonsense words that were (supposedly) pronounceable and thus memorable. As a result of the algorithm, it would often pick a real word (or a real word plus some extra syllables). Sometimes, the real word would be offensive.
So the folks at DEC kindly put a naughty word filter into the generator (in many languages). But then there was the risk that people perusing the source code (it was available on microfiche) could be offended if they stumbled upong the naughty word table.
So the folks at DEC obfuscated the naughty word table with something trivial like ROT13.
That inevitably led to somebody circulating a program to decode the naughty word table, and a Usenet thread that taught us how to cuss in a dozen languages.
Perhaps the pro video projectors are, but most consumer grade and conference room projectors have only recently caught up to a Kodak Ektagraphic projector. Both are in the 1000 to 1300 lumen range for comparable screen sizes according to most of the specs I've seen. A 35mm slide projector does that fairly efficiently with a $14 bulb. Video projectors have much more powerful (and expensive) bulbs to make up for the lower efficiency in the optical path (though DLP is much better than LCD).
The slides are much brighter and crisper than the video in every planetarium presentation I've ever seen. Planetariums are also big users of the gradient-edges for hidden seams trick. Skyskan makes software for producing overlapping panoramas and "all-dome" shows using slides and/or video.
Precise alignment is usually possible, but having a greater tolerance means less effort and cost in setup and maintenance. The amount you need to shift a projector depends greatly on the throw distance. Granted, for rear projection, this is usually limited. But in front projection you're often shooting quite a distance with long-throw lenses.
I'd hardly call this "innovative" or even label it as a "technology." It's a standard multi-image slide show trick that probably goes back at least to the 1960s. (It was old hat when I did it in 1989.) It has been done with movie projection and is routinely done with video projection (see Dataton WatchOut).
The trick is to have some overlap between the projection areas, and to use complementary gradient filters at the overlapping edges. The gradient filters can hide seams that even the slightest misalignment would cause.
There was a graduate student (at CMU?) who made a nifty program that could compensate for alignment problems. The projectors could be crudely aligned, then grids were displayed on each one. A PC cam captured the grids, computed the offset, tilt, and keystoning. From that information a reverse transform was applied to each projector's output, and you got a remarkably well aligned multi-projector image. Very impressive, since the cam was obviously much lower in resolution than the composite image.
Multi-projector techniques are even more important with video than they were with slides, since the light output of video projectors is so much lower. To throw a big image, combining multiple projectors is the most practical option.
As I understand it, only a tiny part of our retinas (the fovea?) have a high density of receptors (rods and/or cones?) and thus can "see" high resolution. The rest of the retina has a lower density of receptors that's good at detecting change, motion, certain colors, and general lighting conditions, but are generally not sharp enough for things like reading.
So my question is, is the high-density zone in a well defined spot? Or does it vary by individual? For example, could somebody's fovea (if that's the right term) be offset a little so that what they're focused on is not what's dead center in their pupil? I know blind spots (where the optic nerves attach) are in different places from eye to eye. Could the blind spot be dead center?
And there's the issue of dominant eye, too, right? The dominant eye tends to line things up, and the other comes along for the ride. In the article there's an example of somebody lining up a pool shot, but that might look pretty different from his/her other eye.
Despite the naysayers here, you could be on to something.
A DLP projector uses a "white" bulb and reflects the light through red, green, and blue filters. The filters (ideally) are band pass filters, allowing only a fraction of the light to pass, and absorbing the rest, which must be reradiated as heat.
If our light source was "tuned" to put most of its power out in the bands used by the filters, then a lot less light would wasted. So if you could make your light source from properly tuned and bright red, green, and blue LEDs, it would be much more efficient, requiring less power and creating less heat. I'm sure the details of this make it hard to solve, but in theory it would be a great solution.
[Are LEDs different colors because of the filtering of the packaging or because they're tuned to produce different wavelengths of light?]
DLP projectors have two basic designs. Most reflect the light off the mirror matrix and through a rotating wheel of red, green, and blue filters. Some high end ones start with three light sources (or a single source that's split with prisms). The three light sources are filtered and then bounced off independent mirror matrixes and recombined with prisms.
Both of these could benefit from an LED approach. With a single matrix, you could get rid of the mechanical color wheel by strobing the LEDs instead (switch them on and off in R-G-B sequence). I believe, (though I'm not certain) that LEDs turn on and off very quickly. With three matrixes, you simply start with three different light sources, rather than splitting a single source and losing heat.
I'm sure there are many electrical and optical challenges with this approach. If they can be solved, you could make very robust, quiet, long-life, low-power DLP displays.
The biggest issue here in my mind is who you would rather have appointing Supreme Court Justices at this point. I believe that'll have a much bigger long-term impact than anything else in the next presidential term.
The laws and banks are better at handling fraud on the debit cards, but a big problem remains: you end up bouncing checks elsewhere.
A former boss of mine discovered fraud on his debit card when his mortgage payment bounced along with several of his other monthly bills. So, although he was able to get reimbursed for the fraudulent charges (a couple thousand dollars of computer equipment shipped to an abandoned house), he was blacklisted as a "bad check writer" and he had to pay late fees for his mortgage and other bills that had bounced. Some of his utilities required a security deposit from that point on.
Uh, what do you call that thing that a thermal printer does?
Nearly all of my long-distance calls are in state, which means $0.10 per minute. Period. I got the same quote from several providers. When I asked if they had calling plans for cheaper rates, they all said "not in state." Due to regulations, there simply isn't a better rate available for in-state long distance on a land line. Allegedly there are some 10-10 numbers that can do better, but I didn't want to mess with them. Since I have always received excellent service from AT&T, I stuck with them.
I'd just like to take this opportunity to point out that IE5 and IE6 together account for just over 80% of the market. (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats. asp) They're slipping!
I believe it's a relatively recent California law that requires notification if personal information was (or may have been) compromised.