Who said anything about business? There are other measures of success. One worthy goal to have for a new idea is to put it out a seminal paper that stimulates further research. Marketing and advertising would be totally irrelevant. Another idea is to develop a proof-of-concept, or to model a process in simulation. Again, no need for business types, who tend to f*ck things up by being plugged into existing markets, and short-term goals. Get an NDA. Find some friends you can trust who are subject matter experts. Comb through posted grants and CFPs.

The current competition is the Kindle, which is currently selling for $360. An open source tablet with a 12-inch screen that can display PDFs already sounds better, to me, even if it costs more than the kindle. The only problem (and it's a big one) is the convenient Amazon access to books and papers. Haven't bought a Kindle, yet, because it's just too small, and has (what seems to me to be) a crappy interface. One of these babies, though, yeah, I could do that. Just get me some wireless access to books and papers.

> We are seeing more and more about high dynamic range (HDR) images,
> where the photographer brackets the exposures and then combines
> the images to increase the dynamic range of the photo.

So instead of an image that goes from black to white, you have an image
that goes from dark grey to light grey. Now you can see all the stuff
that would've been hard to make out in a single photo. I think what has
happened is that you've *decreased* the dynamic range in the photo (or,
more properly speaking, you've used the fixed range better).

If a new camera provides pixels in the range [0,10] instead of the range
[0,1] you can still have the same problem. It's where you map the values
that come through the lens that makes the photo ledgible or not.

Or maybe I'm missing something.