Tags for this video have been changed from 'JP Auclair, Urban, Skiing, British Columbia, BC' to 'JP Auclair, Urban, Skiing, British Columbia, BC, LCD Soundsystem' - edited by Trancecoach

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by eric3579.

@Trancecoach: We're not going to agree, and that's fine. This'll be my last reply.

Retailer strong-arming: Imagine Apple makes up 95% of Best Buy's tablet sales. Off-brand-X wants to sell tablets at Best Buy. Apple says: If you sell Off-brand-X tablets, we will not let you sell our tablets. Off-brand-X is likely to only provide a tiny profit to Best Buy, compared to Apple, so they comply. (This actually happened, in a different form, with Intel paying computer manufacturers to not use AMD processors. See here). Also see price-fixing.

Widget-distribution-prevention: This is just an extension of the previous point.

Buying up all of the competitors: Ma Bell. Old AT&T. That should be enough said. But, if that's not enough, now Ma Bell is nearly entirely re-formed. The US was one government approval away from having cell carriers limited to Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T. That's been spoiled, now, but I don't think it's hard to imagine that future continuing on to two carriers colluding and price-fixing (as Verizon and AT&T pretty much have freedom to do anyway). This is another quasi-natural-monopoly situation (or at least a tragedy of the commons situation), in that the radio spectrum is not infinite. To keep the spectrum usable at all, blocks of frequencies are doled out to radio/TV/cellular/military/etc. etc. with stiff penalties for interference.

Patents: Patents present a litany of problems, but the world without them is even worse. You have two things happen, both of which are bad:
1) New technology remains veiled in secrecy indefinitely; no one else can riff on it even after patents would normally have expired
2) My previous point. The marginal utility of R&D decreases drastically based on the likelihood of a competitor being able to get hold of your secrets before you can profit on them sufficiently.
This is exactly why patents were created. It's a temporary monopoly granted by the government in exchange for the promise that the knowledge will be released to the universe after X years.

Predatory pricing: If excessive, it's illegal. That's why it doesn't happen very often. In a country with anti-trust laws, you just want to hurt your competitor, you don't want to drive them out of the market.

Natural monopolies: Since you brought this one up, you can choose your energy service because the government forces the utility to lease its lines and to decouple distribution from production. That is to say, you have a free market in production because the distribution is not free. See here. My state is the same way.

Misinformation: Who vets marketing claims in a free market? My competitor says that their food is organic. Well--hell, so is mine! They're environmentally conscientious? So am I! Their drug cures cancer? Mine cures it even better!

Oh, shit. Someone caught me in a lie! Well, I'll just force the media to ignore it and ramp up my disinformation campaign.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/a-mastercard-with-an-lcd-display-and-touch-sensitive-buttons/

I remember when the limited horizontal viewing angle on LCDs used to be advertised as a "privacy filter."

Gotta love the marketing department. Useful idea though. I like the idea that I could be sitting at my computer with everyone else looking at me like I'm crazy.

edit: Oh, also: "They Live" anyone. It would be great if you could have a screen that displayed one thing at all sorts of polarities, and then another through the correct filter. Spreadsheet for everyone else, porn for me.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by oritteropo.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Wizard of Oz, LCD' to 'Wizard of Oz, LCD, pinball' - edited by xxovercastxx

@shinyblurry

I have a concession, perhaps a confession to make. An admission if you will. I accept your thesis: every scientist on earth, more or less (except a few religiously devout who still see the truth for what it is) are lying, or they are caving to the pressure of their lying peers, or they have been duped somehow to lie to you. In reality the universe is about 10000 years old, give or take. But all these scientists are, for whatever reason, contributing deliberately or undeliberately to the false claim that the universe and earth is many orders of magnitude older, something like billions of years old. Its all lies. Just about every scientist for the last 200 years have been contributing to this lie, and alternative ideas are being supressed for some dogmatic reason.

Lets suppose all that is true.

Suppose that all these lies, published in peer-review, has been backed up by equally lying peers.

Fine.

I give you that point

I dont think its logical, in fact I think its an insane conspiracy theory, but nonetheless, I concede the entire point. Right now.

How about that shit, eh?

Theres just still one problem for creationism, and its fucking everywhere, its called EVIDENCE. Like maybe you are reading this on a smartphone, with a GPS in it. That GPS unit is communicating right now with 2 sattelites, in freaking ORBIT, triangulating your position right now. Thats some insane science at work right there, but actually thats not the crazy part: The crazy part is that it wouldnt work at all, unless the people who designed that GPS system understood Relativity. Thats right, Einsteinian freaking relativity. The satellites, and their speed relative to earth, would actually give the wrong postion if they relied on Newtons laws.

THOSE VERY SAME principles and knowledge actually is used to tell us how far away stuff in the universe is. some stuff are actually (As in your-GPS-can-ACTUALLY-tell-you-exactly-where-you-are kind of "actually")really fucking far atway, like billions of light-YEARS. which means the light left from other parts of the universe literally BILLIONS of years ago, before they reached our telescopes. Like Bill Nye explained, a smoke detector works on principles that we understand about the half-lives of atoms, again the same shit used to understand the age of fossils and shit we find in the ground. the LCD screen you are likely looking at is an innovation that comes from understanding wavelenghts of light, again used to measure the distance of galaxies that emitted light billions of years ago.

You dont have to trust scientists, most of the EVIDENCE is RIGHT FUCKING THERE, in front of you, in your pocket, in your hand, around your home, in every school, in every home, in every post office or courtroom, in the streets. ACTUAL REAL EVIDENCE, right there, PROVING, every second, that the universe is billions of years old.

Every scientist since Newton could be a lying sack of shit, all working on the same conspiracy, and it would mean fuck all, because the evidence speaks for itself.

The earth is definately NOT ten thousand years young.

Screenshot won't help since it's a monitor thing, not videocard. I tried to take photo of the monitor but it doesn't show up there. It is a really faint jiggling/fuzziness of sharp contrast page elements that are near such background. Like word "sarcasm" next to the checkbox when writing comments has vertical fuzziness.
It is kinda similar to when you connect some LCD monitors with VGA cable their menus have options like "pixel clock" and "phase"...Except I use DVI and can't adjust those.

>> ^grinter:

>> ^deathcow:
Panorama Done!
frame 1920 of 1920
back LCD lights up
<< NO MEMORY CARD >>

I shot some sun rays breaking through the early morning mist over the mountains around Machu Picchu. It was gorgeous - dream lighting - and about an hour later realized that the camera was set to a ludicrously high ISO. I was devastated. I can't imagine how that guy would have felt if something had gone wrong.


Man... bummer... I hope you got some pictures you liked out of it anyway.

I shot a few hours of a galaxy through the telescope the other day with the ISO set on AUTO. Also a bummer but nothing compared to your story.

>> ^deathcow:

Panorama Done!
frame 1920 of 1920
back LCD lights up
<< NO MEMORY CARD >>


I shot some sun rays breaking through the early morning mist over the mountains around Machu Picchu. It was gorgeous - dream lighting - and about an hour later realized that the camera was set to a ludicrously high ISO. I was devastated. I can't imagine how that guy would have felt if something had gone wrong.

Panorama Done!
frame 1920 of 1920

back LCD lights up

<< NO MEMORY CARD >>

This is interesting. If it's a fake, they're not using the mouse. You can see the mouse in the reflection of the screen... the silver stripe can be seen... it's near the corner of the keyboard, and it winds up behind the "R" in the word "Wallpaper" on the screen when the flash is popped. There is no hand on the mouse. Also the message that pops up in the lower right makes it seem like the background is real and not just a couple JPGs being switched between.

On another board someone theorized that maybe the flash wreaked havoc with the LCD crystals themselves. Nope, it wouldn't knock out just the right half of the screen with a straight line down the middle.

Better theories:
Could a small EMP from the flash damage a chip behind the screen if it were right near the flash? Notice how close they put it to the screen. Maybe there is a separate driver of some sort for the right and left halves of the display. Maybe the light sensor that keeps the brightness comfortable in different lighting conditions produced a spike Asus never saw before in testing, and knocked out a chip. Possibly only temporarily.

It'd be interesting to know if anyone else has tried this, or if Asus has responded to it.

Reverse engineer that paper thin LCD money. The money made would make up for everything lost in the video.

Oh shit, I forgot about the cyberpuck, which sounds like a robotic Shakespeare character. <- boom goes the dynamite.
And the whole 1280 x 800 smacks of bs to me in the same way Forte's claims of 512x460 did: adding together the per-eye resolution. Granted, they seem to be upfront about the vertical resolution of 800 (which isn't great for 2012 either) but that horizontal res? Boolshit! It might be 1280 for an iguana with eyes on either side of it's head, looking at different shit per eyeball all its life. But for we humans, each eyeball pretty much looks at the same thing, not accounting for parallax of course. So I'd say the actual horizontal resolution might approach 800, depending on how much they want each eye to "share" as it were. So it's essentially a giant square.

Naysaying/partypooping aside, it still looks promising. There's nothing quite like moving your head around to observe a virtual world: it affords the kind of immersion you can't touch with a standard monitor setup, I don't care how big it is. <- that's what she never says. Boom again!

>> ^probie:

>> ^shuac:
Back in '96, I bought a Forte VFX-1 which was a VR headset with stereoscopic vision, very comfy over-the-ear headphones, and motion tracking. All for about $1000.
Each eyeball had it's own little LCD screen (263x230) and I can tell you that it looked like pure ass. Despite it's shortcomings, I played the original System Shock with it and I still have very fond memories of skulking through Citadel station with that thing strapped to my melon.
While I'm not interested in contributing to a kickstarter campaign (after all, that's why we have venture capitalists), I may be interested in a finished retail product.

Ha! I, too, bought a VFX-1 headset. (Had to buy a separate Number Nine S3 Virge card as well so the interface cable would work). I never did play SS1 on it, but I did roll through Quake 1 and all of it's mission packs, as well as used it for Looking Glass' Flight Unlimited. I never used the Cyberpuck controller, as it wasn't very intuitive to me. Once GLQuake came out (which had to run at nothing less than 512x384) that was the final nail in the coffin. But fun times while it lasted.