If you're going to do all the work for me, there's no point in arguing. I'll just apologise for pricking your ego and leave it there.

If this process is simpler and quicker to reach the fabs, and produces a notable performance increase, then it's worth it to develop. Someone will want to buy it, and that means someone will want to develop it.

Just to hammer it home: why do you bother, ever, to upgrade your hardware, knowing it'll one day be obsolete?

The process has to be incredibly time-sensitive in order to work, and the imaging process has to subtract ambient light in order to obtain the reflected-laser data. This ambient-light recording has to happen at a different time to when the laser is fired, so variable-light conditions or the lack of an incredibly steady camera, image object and reflective surface will make it basically impossible to render the image.

I absolutely love the concept. I just think that the nay-sayers whom Professor Raskar claims to be defeating were correct. It might not be theoretically impossible, but the practical limitations are so severe that I don't envisage them being "engineered" away - and if they are, such phenomenal engineering accomplishments would make this application appear trivial in comparison with the other things we could do.

There is some truth to that, but a shitty attitude like that is the reason there are so many incompetent middle-managers and so few real achievers out there. Somebody has to actually do the work, and that means getting properly educated.

Let's take all measures to prevent cheaters from passing, and then only the truly gifted "creative" folks will succeed in cheating. If they're good enough to pull it off, their skills are probably genuinely worth something. Otherwise, I don't want to encourage a shitty system to be responsible for a shitty workforce full of shitty shysters.

Nominally, this proposal will have no detrimental impact on any current service. Put simply, ISPs are being given the option to offer a "premium" service to those data suppliers who wish for their content to be delivered at a "premium" rate, at a premium price, thereby improving their perceived web experience.

To the simple-minded, this is a perfectly straightforward case of adding value to a service and charging for that added value. Nobody has to pay anything extra if they don't want to. However, this doesn't address the brutal reality.

Firstly, ISPs already saturate their bandwidth as far as they're able in order to be competitive. The creation of an express-lane for premium content will, by default, require the degrading of non-premium content delivery. Certainly the increased revenue could be used to improve infrastructure and have a net benefit on all bandwidth, but ISPs are businesses and it's fundamentally naive to assume this will be the result.

Secondly - and more importantly - this move would change the culture of the web irrevocably. In the first instance, content providers will have to pick a camp, and we will be faced with a two-tier system. Two-tier will just be the beginning though, and companies will have to quickly start incorporating their "content deliver" streaming costs into their business strategy. Like any variable, contracted service, it will be open to competition, abuse and legal dicking-about. It will change the very nature of the web, and we will all suffer from the lack of an even field.

A more subtle problem would be the loss of impetus to improve the efficiency of data delivery. As things stand, it is in every single person's and organisation's interest to constantly strive to improve the bandwidth-efficiency of their sites, languages, algorithms and services. As soon as the big guns find themselves able to take a short-cut to improving their users' web-experience by paying for it, half the major driving force behind these innovations in efficiency will be gone.

I'm sure there are many other reasons to oppose this change, and I honestly can't think of any compelling reason to approve it - unless, as I said, one takes the short-sighted, uninformed (or plain greedy) stance that this would improve certain uses of the web, at least for now.