Martin,

The last time I had a professional video produced, I paid $5000 for a one-minute commercial, and those were rock-bottom prices from hungry people who wanted it for their own portfolio. I doubt I could get that today. $8000 for the entire conference is really volunteer work on Gary's part.

Someone's got to pay for it. One alternative would be to get a corporate sponsor and give them a keynote, which is what so many conferences do, but that would be abandoning our editorial independence. Having Gary fund his own operation through Kickstarter without burdening the conference is what we're doing. We're really lucky we could get that.

We do charge entry to the convention. We get really nice facilities for the people who actually travel there and for the speakers. Last year's location was subperb. But I don't see why they should actually subsidize the folks who do not attend.

I think TAPR's policy is that the presentations be freely redistributable, but I don't know what they and Gary have discussed. I am one of the speakers and have always made sure that my own talk would be freely redistributable. I wouldn't really want it to be modifiable except for translation and quotes, since it's a work of opinion. Nobody should get the right to modify the video in such a way as to make my opinion seem like it's anything other than what it is.

If I remember correctly, it was 4 video channels last year: tracking on presenter, proscenium, audience, projector.

Yes. I put in $100, and I am asking other people to put in money to sponsor these programs so that everyone, including people who did not put in any money at all, can see them for free. If you look at the 150+ videos, you can see that Gary's pretty good at this (and he brought a really professional-seeming cameraman to Hamvention, too) and the programs are interesting. Even if at least four of them feature yours truly :-) He filmed every one of the talks at the TAPR DCC last year (and has filmed for the past 5 years) and it costs him about $8000 to drive there from North Carolina to Austin, Texas; to bring his equipment and to keep it maintained, to stay in a motel, to run a multi-camera shoot for every talk in the conference, and to get some fair compensation for his time in editing (and he does a really good job at that).

Seriously, that is what that is.

and yet, none used that to develop an energy producing system.

totally different. Daytons is a mechanical system. MIT's is not.

Seriously, something like that would enable a transmitter and a camera to be set up. Where this could be useful is for fire, weather, geological monitoring. Heck, this could even be used to put simple digital telescopes up on 14K' tops and broadcast back.

Right now, MS is loaded with some of the worst coders in the world. They continue to produce loads of crap. And like IBM, they have been following the path of finding cheaper, rather than better.
If they let a lot of trash go and start hiring GOOD coders, they might actually finally produce a decent OS.

But thankfully, that has not happened in nearly 50 years, so....

Which is why I have not bought CFLs in 5 years and am only replacing the bulbs in our house with CREE (and a few philips, but I try to avoid them since they are produced in the worst nation in terms of pollution).
Your second point is the WHOLE issue. I look forward to OCO2. It will show the world one hell of a surprise. Things are far worse than is known, and we are actually encouraging the worse nations to continue getting worse.

And that is why you need a leveled economic playing field. What you have there is NOT leveled.

WRONG APPROACH.
Gov. will NEVER do it. Look at Europe. They do not even meet their own conditions of kyoto, while America did due to ONE THING: economics.
The ONLY way that this will be solved is via applying economics to this problem and leveling the playing field.

And I will bet that few, if any, of those H2/H3 owners support science.

Do not get me wrong. I have no issue with somebody owning large cars like that. I just think that GM was stupid to not convert those to serial hybrids.