In terms of price, the Canon and Sony are better, but the Nikon is still currently the best DSLR you can buy. And, for the inflated price, it had better be. I'd rate Sony virtually tied with Canon as it's really a re-badged Minolta. Myself, I own neither. I don't like Bayer pattern sensors, so that's a whole other discussion;)
- The best MP3 players are actually made by Apple and SanDisk. Sony is maybe 3rd or 4th. - The best laptops are made by Alienware if you can actually afford them, that is. - Yes, they do have excellent gaming and portable gaming machines. 1st and 2nd place here (let's face it, Nintendo has a lock on the hand-held market) - The best TVs are made by Samsung and Pioneer. That Samsung makes the panels that Sony and Apple and many others use in their TVs and monitors is possibly a clue? - The best ebook reader isn't Sony.(like it matters - paperback books are cheap enough as it is) - The best headphones for the money are made by Grado, and the best speakers, well, let me tell you about *real* audio... (insert list of 20+ companies that are undoubtedly better) - Nikon makes the best DSLR and Fuji and Canon make the best pocket cameras (essentially a tie) Son'y DSLR is just a re-branded Minolta in any case. Just like how most of their TVs are re-branded Samsung units with different software and menus. - Cellphones - have to give this one to Nokia and Samsung. Everything else is second-rate when it comes to actually being a phone (Iphone included).
Sony's claim to fame is that they do everything pretty well and consistently come in the top 3 in just about everything. But they aren't impossible to boycott. My PS3 is the only Sony thing I own. Whether or not I can "hack" it is immaterial. I can do far more experimental and alternate OS related things with my PC if I wanted to. It's just something for my son to play games on that I don't have to deal with anti-virus and patching and all of the other headaches of trying to get a PC to do online gaming. Just turn it on and forget about it.
"I can't hack my PS3" - well, so what? I don't hear more than a few crackpots actually going on about how they can't jail-break their IPhones. (especially now that AT&T isn't the only option) Almost everyone understood the contract that they signed and uses the device as intended.
True, they don't like competition, but China's status as a place where IP and copyright issues are looked at as being nearly meaningless doe shave advantages to the company that uses workers there or makes their product there. They can't necessarily sell the product in the U.S., and there might be issues to deal with, but say, if I wanted to design or build a new type of solar panel. I wouldn't get my pants sued off for tinkering in my garage just because what I cam e up with was claimed by some corporation as IP years ago.
The reason China is doing so well is because they make it easy for business to do business there. The U.S. is only *slightly* better than the U.K. at this point in terms of how painful it is to get anything done and still be complying with the law.
And you wonder why more and more companies are fleeing to China where (U.S. - remember we created the entire world "patent system" to cover our asses after we blatantly stole everything we could in the 1700s and 1800s) patents simply don't exist.
Right now it can take you literally a year to deal with the red tape and legal issues involved in a new product because of some connector or screen or other small part that the company that owns the patent is being an asshat about. Meanwhile, the same piece of metal and plastic can be designed and manufactured in weeks overseas.
The #1 thing that patents need to have changed about them is simple - that ANYONE can use them. Ability to utilize existing patents should always include a mandatory option to pay fees to use the technology. Sitting on a patent (especially IP) being a cock-block is counter to everything the system stands for, since the original idea was that while you had exclusive rights to a product, you also would license it for a fee to your competitors for use in non-competing products. ie - they could sell something similar using your part but likely at a worse price than you could build it for. This kept unrelated larger projects like designing new jet engines from grinding to a halt because of the company that designs a tiny part inside it being jerks and simply saying no.
Now, it's a tool to pressure competition out of any and all markets. Nobody licenses anything anymore, and nobody builds anything for you either, even if you ask.(unless you're another mega-corp) Most companies won't be even bothered to sell you their product or idea if you offer to pay them. It's always "we own this idea, so go away or we'll sue you."
None of this exists in China. You simply buy an item, reverse engineer the one critical part, and include it in your design. Kind of like Edison and everyone else a hundred years ago did in the U.S. You wonder why we're bleeding jobs in the U.S.? Because we've come full circle in 235 years. We're now worse than the tyranny and oppression that we fought to get away from. We're drowning in paperwork, red tape, lawyers, and arcane laws to the point where normal citizens can't do business any more, and large corporations simply move everything to China and India.
I know if I had a business, I'd build it overseas. Where I live in California, it's so hostile to business in general, let alone dealing with patents and copyrights, that it's nearly impossible to do anything unless you are filthy rich to begin with.(or open a franchise and suck up to some giant corporation)
1: Netflix and online poker and cell phones and fancy cars and... The number of ways that adults piss away money when their kids are in trouble is astounding. I feel no pity for them. That it's unfortunate for the kids, well, life ifs tough and parents MUST be responsible.
2: Japan has a lot of teenage problems, but they are not from schoolwork so much as social pressures and issues at home. In any case, schoolwork is taken seriously as it should be.(I could have said Germany)
3: Look, either you improve or you end up a nobody or worse. The major failing of U.S. education is that we think that every child should be saved. In reality, you cannot and should not stop or slow down to save the slackers and idiots. Not when nobody else in the world does this. They have more education, more training, and are more serious because if they aren't, they get dropped and then they're doomed. Our education system needs to have more teeth in it and actually fail people.
And, yes, the threat of failing a grade does actually get parents involved.
The number of days the kids at my son's school spend preparing for standardized tests is... ZERO.
No, really. The tests are so simple that they are literally considered a time-waster and a free day off by the staff. They cover everything already and more in the course of normal classes. The issue here isn't that the teachers are spending time teaching the wrong stuff, it's that the parents are idiots who aren't teaching anything at home. So what you end up with are two schools: The ones with decent test scores and grades where the tests are largely ignored and the others where schools serve as remedial classes to teach the basics. Often over and over again in a futile attempt to save and teach every last child. My son's school holds back idiots. There is no conveyor system between grades. The parents figure out right quick that it's their job to get a tutor if there's a problem.
There is a great shortage of decent teachers in the U.S. right now. If you are stuck in a situation having to teach as the OP described, then you need to move to a school where they don't have to waste time preparing for these standardized tests.
The government's solution to this should be even simpler. Any child who cannot pass (IIRC, it's something like 61%?) these tests is held back a year without exception. If that means we have a bunch of 20 year old seniors in high school in some districts, then so be it. Obviously, if it's just one area, remedial class in summer would suffice. Note - they do this is Japan and other nations already. You pass or you are held back. Add some teeth to it and watch the parents and teachers get involved again.
And that's how you know that the one in the article is fake. I can spot half a dozen problems from the picture alone, from the heavy gauge steel frame to the geometry and (well, the list is very long). It looks like something cobbled together in a garage by people who don't know how to do proper design.(at least use aluminum tubing to keep the weight down, fools) The British team, though, it looks like a proper purpose-built vehicle.
Note - I do wish someone here at Slashdot would filter some of the articles for common sense and scientific validity. A lot of rubbish is getting through lately.
The glass that they made back then was highly opaque like stained glass, at best(and about as uniform). They simply lacked the technology to make anything remotely usable as either a lens or to make a functional mirror. That meant that they had to use polished metal(since we don't have any evidence of electroplating - and using sodium bicarbonate to clean and/or polish the silver is as best as they could have done)
(from glassonline.com) "It was the Romans who began to use glass for architectural purposes, with the discovery of clear glass (through the introduction of manganese oxide) in Alexandria around AD 100. Cast glass windows, albeit with poor optical qualities, thus began to appear in the most important buildings in Rome and the most luxurious villas of Herculaneum and Pompeii."
The issue is that the technology to make clear glass simply wasn't something that they had at the time. Opaque glass was known (since about 1500BCE), but let's say he had the idea to use blown glass somehow (which would have been clear enough).
"A major breakthrough in glassmaking was the discovery of glassblowing some time between 27 BC and AD 14, attributed to Syrian craftsmen from the Sidon-Babylon area. The long thin metal tube used in the blowing process has changed very little since then. In the last century BC, the ancient Romans then began blowing glass inside moulds, greatly increasing the variety of shapes possible for hollow glass items."
Archimedes lived from 287 BC – c. 212 BC.
Mythbusters tried it, even with modern mirrors and simply failed. It would require modern materials and modern knowledge of math and science to achieve. As smart as he was, there's no way that he could have overcome all of the missing technology by himself.
A good analogy to this is Tesla's famous "death ray". Supposedly he figured out how to make a particle beam weapon in 1937. But scientists using computers and technology that he didn't have at the time have tried for roughly seven decades to come up with something like it. With no results. I suppose some day(apparently within 20-30 years) we'll have the ability to make something like that, but the fact remains that it will require technology that simply didn't exist back then.
It's not a matter of being clever. It's raw, hard science and engineering.
You need to have an incredibly uniform and shiny surface, even if you have the shape and physics correct. This means one of two things has to happen:
1 - You are using mirrors. This means that you need optically transparent glass. Unfortunately, their technology back then only allowed for essentially stained glass or the equivalent. (You can thank Egypt for this bit of technology, btw). So while they might have understood the concept, there was a massive technological hurdle to overcome.
2 - You could do it with coating a suitable surface with something highly reflective, but that would require electroplating it to achieve the uniformity and shine that you'd require. polished refined metal just isn't shiny enough(say, bronze plates or similar). While there is some evidence that they *might* have possibly used primitive batteries for electroplating, nothing suggests anything of this scale was ever devised. We don't even have examples of them using it for jewelery, let alone industrial scale siege machines.
My guess is that he created something like this to merely blind the enemies. Given that it would make you feel noticeably hotter in addition to blinding you and confusing you, a myth about it being a "death ray" seems likely given how superstitious people were back then.
Often they "Bust" something that they consider to be highly implausible or statistically unlikely even if there have been one or two cases of it actually happening. The show is focused upon "can this happen under normal or slightly abnormal circumstances" more than "if the right set of circumstances happen at the right time and everything goes as wrong as possible..."
But concerning the solar "death" ray, the real issue was that while you can easily make one out of modern materials, they didn't have modern mirrors or modern optics 2000 years ago. They've taken this into account.
Besides, where are you going to get to see a canon made out of duct tape?
There's nothing that says that Amazon has to play along with Apple, though. This move is as you stated, a money-grab by Apple. Apple gets 30% and Amazon gets the couple of percent that's left over. In the end, Jobs is back to the same tricks that eventually led to him being kicked out of Apple in the first place. Instead of embracing change and open standards, he's once again backing into the corner of proprietary technology and being a complete control freak.
It lost him the PC market and it will eventually lose him this market as well. Amazon and others won't play along and this will create a divide in the market. One which Apple will simply lose.
The rules have always been quite simple. You can do whatever you want with your PS3 as long as you don't go onto Sony's gaming network. Microsoft does the same thing with its Xbox Live - you play by the rules or not at all. The sheer number of people whining about this when it's standard boilerplate business practice to control access to your own servers and private network(s) is amazing. When you connect, it verifies that you aren't running any malicious code or hacks/cheats. This has been a staple of online anti-cheating software since the late 90s.
And, no cheating isn't controlled by having "better availability and providing value with a purchase a pirate cant get.", as one person wrote. It's entirely different in a console's case, since the games aren't pirated in the first place. Cheating in online games like this is controlled by making sure that everyone is using the same software and hardware. And, yes, the XBox does this already - they scan your machine and shut you down if you are caught cheating.
Concerning the source, this site really needs to hire someone to double-check new posts for basic common sense and validity before allowing it to.go live. IRC chat? Seriously?
Yet, suppose that you dug out a several mile cavern (or found a large set of caverns)? You simply can't do that in space. If there's heat, water, and light that we add, it being self-sustaining becomes much easier. There are plenty of examples of self-sustaining ecosystems on Earth that can be found in caves. Our idiocy is trying to build it all in a small sealed dome. Of course if you could make it several miles across it would be easier to accomplish.
Yes, it could be hit by a missile, but it also would have several days advanced notice of the incoming rocket. Which only a couple of nations have the ability to build. While a normal missile can hit a satellite, virtually none can send a decent sized payload as far as the Moon. If the main area is a few miles underground, nothing will penetrate anyways.
http://www.appletravel.cn/news-10166.html So far, we've made a 20km cave here on Earth. All we have to do on the Moon is dig and dig some more. It can even be done by robots for the most part. Of course, if we could find a stable cave underground, it would simplify things greatly.
A base on the Moon is out of range of conventional missiles and weapons, allows for effortless spying, can be easily hardened against an attack, and if you build most of it underground, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem isn't that unreasonable as there's tons of room. Also, we are finding out that aside from the radiation and micro-meteorite blasted "eggshell" exterior layer, the Moon is pretty much normal rock and dirt underneath. There's even water and it appears to also have a small internal heat source/liquid core. So if we dig down deep enough, we'll have no issues with heat and/or power, either. Also, low gravity is dozens of times better for our bodies than none at all as all you'd have to do is wear weighted suits to keep your muscles in reasonable shape.
Space is a massive problem by comparison. One small nudge or one errant bit of debris and there's a hole and a massive problem. One small explosive or missile and it's doomed. A base on the Moon could easily be build as tough and as resistant to external forces as a typical bunker(if we're talking in the next hundred or so years as a "lifeboat") Remember, when it hits the fan, low orbit will be a literal ring of debris and exploded ordinance that will effectively stop us from even getting into space for a couple of decades. There's zero possibility that in a worst case scenario that they would not target everything and anything that their missiles could reach.
But using this as a platform to work your way to a base on the Moon is a viable plan. Oh, wait - China already says that it has plans for exactly this sort of thing.
We ran out of money and have nothing. We're *so* repeating the collapse of the British Empire that it's not funny any more. At this point, we simply should give up and maybe with the EU we can manage something together. Spending money on something that we can't possibly beat the Chinese in any more when we're about to go belly-up is simply absurd.
Our screwed up system here in the U.S. will only serve to send more and more scientists overseas to work where they can be free of this type of insanity.
I know that if I was a 25 year old who had a degree in biology or engineering, I'd make a bee-line to Asia. The insanity concerning IP, copyrights, non-disclosure contracts, and on and on, plus the impossibility to finding work in the U.S. right now. There's so much red tape to do anything in this country now that everyone simply has lost the will to do anything about it.
Tron in 2D would be like going to an airshow while you're recovering from eye surgery on one of your eyes.
Some movies are absolutely stunning in 3D, because they are done correctly. Tron didn't cause me a moment of eye-strain and I wear glasses (3D glasses are on top of my normal glasses).
Avatar was done correctly and is the only appliaction of the technology that does work That is:
1 - Digital. The displacement between the two images is on a per-pixel basis. This is too small for our eyes to easily discern. The image looks nearly identical with the glasses on and off from the perspective of focus.
2 - Depth only. Adding an artificial dimension towards the audience is going to cause eye problems, but using it to overcome the limitations of film's optics and limited depth of field is actually more what our eyes expect and our brains desire.
Maybe half a dozen films so far have taken this approach. The rest are the typical eye-strain junk that everyone complains about.
You're also forgetting whatever they are using for a medium to suspend it (ie - it's not in a vacuum?) That means there's also air, maybe water, and by the look of it, glass for the container, in the mix, which can possibly help to contribute. The real issue is, though, how fast does it use up the nickel (this appears to be a simple reaction instead of actual cold fusion) and is it cheaper than other power methods? If we're talking about hundreds of watt-hours for a pound of nickel, maybe it's viable. If it's, as I suspect, going to cost several dollars per KWH, then you might as well really be just burning wood as others have suggested.
The lack of industrial grade shielding in the lab suggests a simple reaction versus actual fusion, which would likely irradiate the entire room to certainly lethal levels. I know I wouldn't attempt to make such a machine without preparing a safe and radiation-resistant vessel.
Still, converting one element into another is a neat trick, even if it's not necessarily what they claim it to be. That's potentially more interesting in fact than the OP's article, it it is true.(and if it actually produces a stable isotope)
The article makes an all too typical assumption. That is, that it assumes that the effect is roughly linear. The problem is that, like they've found in Antarctica, if there is enough melting, three things can happen. One, the sheet can start to float, and two, as more pieces break off due to this effect, more ground is exposed which acts like a heat sink. LAstly, as the ice melts, the land itself rises out of the ocean, exacerbating the issue.
Combined with the fact that ice has essentially no transition phase between solid and liquid, what's ice a few degrees lower can literally ALL melt in a region in short order. 1 or 2 degrees hotter is a massive change as a result, and it won't even take 100 years at the rate its accelerating.
Though, someone could also argue that film or something taken with a camera could in theory be printed or used in a theater, where the limitations of a (now our only option) LCD display wouldn't apply.
But yes, if we're talking about computers, there's another limiting factor. We'd essentially need a whole new system from the ground up to take and utilize the images - aside from stuff like shooting movies and the like(which they already do for IMAX and similar).
What we need instead isn't HDR, but HCR. I hear that there is work on a 4-color sensor(as an example) that might provide more accurate colors, since you need at least one level higher than normal when converting from digital to analog as a rule to deal with conversion errors. If the colors can be made to look accurate under any lighting condition, the brightness will just cease to be a major issue. Or become just that - something to be adjusted after-wards.
Which brings me to the real point of this insanity surrounding "HDR".
Q: Why do we actually need HDR? A: Because today's sensors for the most part use technology that makes the images look like junk in poor lighting conditions. Specifically, the colors are terrible and there's very little ability to deal with over-exposures. The range between "perfect image" and "junk" is a very small margin with not much leeway or forgiveness between the extremes.
The response so far has largely been to increase dynamic range to silly levels, but that's really useless if the colors are inaccurate a a result (or more likely in spite of it). The fundamental issue remains unresolved. GIGO, in other words.
What we really need is sensor technology that deals with colors in a better manner. So that when we are faced with instances where the shot would normally look bad or washed out, the sensor can deal with it and correct for it like our brain does. Fuji and Sigma have tried but their attempts have been so-so. We need to keep exploring new technologies like this, IMO, rather than just doing more and more tricks with software.
Well, that's somewhat true. A typical sensor will accurately capture all but about one F-stop higher and lower than human vision. That means that overblown super-HDR type movie poster or similar shots and the like aren't something that you should expect in any camera. Why it behaves like a HDR camera is because it doesn't hit 255 and just simply put solid white in the image when it gets over-exposed. A typical Bayer sensor will do this and there's nothing to be done about it - you hit that wall and you're done. There's nothing to recover at that point - the data just simply vanished.
The Fuji has two methods by which it does this. The first was the Super CCD SR with actually had dual sensors and took two shots at once at different f-stops and then blended them. The EXR version that they currently sell does pixel binning, which while it does create a slightly better dynamic range, it suffers from more interpolation issues (as one would expect) than a typical sensor. It works, but it's less than optimal in terms of color fidelity.
http://www.kenrockwell.com/fuji/s5/dynamic-range.htm This is an older article, and he's a bit of a tool (has a hard-on for Nikon and hates anything but landscapes), but 2/3 the way down you can see a great example of this in action. Also, the color charts at the bottom show how it (and also Foveon/Sigma) sensor deals with bad contrast. Red goes to pink, then to white as you'd expect. At least in a far more gradual manner, with very little yellow. This means that the parts of the image that normally would require HDR or benefit from them have proper color balance/truer colors.
The Sigma doesn't have better dynamic range than a typical camera, but it does the same trick that our eyes do, which is that when the cones in our eyes get saturated, they do it in a gradual manner. This results in pictures that look overexposed like film - a nice soft shoulder at the extremes that can be recovered or dealt with in software. Is the Foveon/Sigma HDR? Well, sort of and sort of not. How it deals with colors is truer and resolutions are identical for each color. So it operates more like HDR for chroma and less for luminance. This is easiest to see in a Bayer sensor where purples and reds look fake and grainy when next to strong blue or green sources. Typically, unless you shoot very low light or black and white, better color fidelity is always the better choice.
And these are not some prototype sensors or custom application technologies, either. They sold millions of these units over the years. 2003 for the Fuji Super CCD technology and around the same time for the Foveon as well. That they've done precious little with it in the last (almost) decade is really unfortunate.
Two companies already dealt with this in the past, though they aren't doing as much with the technology as one would hope.
1 - Fuji has a sensor that does HDR already. Several years ago, in fact. It has two overlapping layers of sensors and takes two images at the same time, then blends that two together. Done, can buy it today. Just it isn't in use in a video camera yet(and their current camera doesn't do video very well)
2 - Foveon also has a different sensor approach where it is layered like film. This gives it the same dynamic range as our yes, or very close to it. It produces amazingly clean and beautiful images. But the resolution of the sensor is fairly low at about 4.5MP. Though, those are real full-color photosites (no interpolation or moire as ther is no "pattern" to the sensor), so it compares with a typical 10-12MP camera. Still, it's fairly low. Yes, their latest camera does do HD video, which is quite nice.
The OP can be forgiven, though, as these two companies spend almost nothing on advertising these two technologies. I'd wager that only one in 20 or 30 people who are interested photography and video (that I talk to) even are aware of them. A normal person just simply doesn't know at all.
Slashdot Mirror
In terms of price, the Canon and Sony are better, but the Nikon is still currently the best DSLR you can buy. And, for the inflated price, it had better be. I'd rate Sony virtually tied with Canon as it's really a re-badged Minolta. Myself, I own neither. I don't like Bayer pattern sensors, so that's a whole other discussion ;)
*sound of needle*
Wait...
- The best MP3 players are actually made by Apple and SanDisk. Sony is maybe 3rd or 4th.
- The best laptops are made by Alienware if you can actually afford them, that is.
- Yes, they do have excellent gaming and portable gaming machines. 1st and 2nd place here (let's face it, Nintendo has a lock on the hand-held market)
- The best TVs are made by Samsung and Pioneer. That Samsung makes the panels that Sony and Apple and many others use in their TVs and monitors is possibly a clue?
- The best ebook reader isn't Sony.(like it matters - paperback books are cheap enough as it is)
- The best headphones for the money are made by Grado, and the best speakers, well, let me tell you about *real* audio... (insert list of 20+ companies that are undoubtedly better)
- Nikon makes the best DSLR and Fuji and Canon make the best pocket cameras (essentially a tie) Son'y DSLR is just a re-branded Minolta in any case. Just like how most of their TVs are re-branded Samsung units with different software and menus.
- Cellphones - have to give this one to Nokia and Samsung. Everything else is second-rate when it comes to actually being a phone (Iphone included).
Sony's claim to fame is that they do everything pretty well and consistently come in the top 3 in just about everything. But they aren't impossible to boycott. My PS3 is the only Sony thing I own. Whether or not I can "hack" it is immaterial. I can do far more experimental and alternate OS related things with my PC if I wanted to. It's just something for my son to play games on that I don't have to deal with anti-virus and patching and all of the other headaches of trying to get a PC to do online gaming. Just turn it on and forget about it.
"I can't hack my PS3" - well, so what? I don't hear more than a few crackpots actually going on about how they can't jail-break their IPhones. (especially now that AT&T isn't the only option) Almost everyone understood the contract that they signed and uses the device as intended.
True, they don't like competition, but China's status as a place where IP and copyright issues are looked at as being nearly meaningless doe shave advantages to the company that uses workers there or makes their product there. They can't necessarily sell the product in the U.S., and there might be issues to deal with, but say, if I wanted to design or build a new type of solar panel. I wouldn't get my pants sued off for tinkering in my garage just because what I cam e up with was claimed by some corporation as IP years ago.
The reason China is doing so well is because they make it easy for business to do business there. The U.S. is only *slightly* better than the U.K. at this point in terms of how painful it is to get anything done and still be complying with the law.
And you wonder why more and more companies are fleeing to China where (U.S. - remember we created the entire world "patent system" to cover our asses after we blatantly stole everything we could in the 1700s and 1800s) patents simply don't exist.
Right now it can take you literally a year to deal with the red tape and legal issues involved in a new product because of some connector or screen or other small part that the company that owns the patent is being an asshat about. Meanwhile, the same piece of metal and plastic can be designed and manufactured in weeks overseas.
The #1 thing that patents need to have changed about them is simple - that ANYONE can use them. Ability to utilize existing patents should always include a mandatory option to pay fees to use the technology. Sitting on a patent (especially IP) being a cock-block is counter to everything the system stands for, since the original idea was that while you had exclusive rights to a product, you also would license it for a fee to your competitors for use in non-competing products. ie - they could sell something similar using your part but likely at a worse price than you could build it for. This kept unrelated larger projects like designing new jet engines from grinding to a halt because of the company that designs a tiny part inside it being jerks and simply saying no.
Now, it's a tool to pressure competition out of any and all markets. Nobody licenses anything anymore, and nobody builds anything for you either, even if you ask.(unless you're another mega-corp) Most companies won't be even bothered to sell you their product or idea if you offer to pay them. It's always "we own this idea, so go away or we'll sue you."
None of this exists in China. You simply buy an item, reverse engineer the one critical part, and include it in your design. Kind of like Edison and everyone else a hundred years ago did in the U.S. You wonder why we're bleeding jobs in the U.S.? Because we've come full circle in 235 years. We're now worse than the tyranny and oppression that we fought to get away from. We're drowning in paperwork, red tape, lawyers, and arcane laws to the point where normal citizens can't do business any more, and large corporations simply move everything to China and India.
I know if I had a business, I'd build it overseas. Where I live in California, it's so hostile to business in general, let alone dealing with patents and copyrights, that it's nearly impossible to do anything unless you are filthy rich to begin with.(or open a franchise and suck up to some giant corporation)
1: Netflix and online poker and cell phones and fancy cars and... The number of ways that adults piss away money when their kids are in trouble is astounding. I feel no pity for them. That it's unfortunate for the kids, well, life ifs tough and parents MUST be responsible.
2: Japan has a lot of teenage problems, but they are not from schoolwork so much as social pressures and issues at home. In any case, schoolwork is taken seriously as it should be.(I could have said Germany)
3: Look, either you improve or you end up a nobody or worse. The major failing of U.S. education is that we think that every child should be saved. In reality, you cannot and should not stop or slow down to save the slackers and idiots. Not when nobody else in the world does this. They have more education, more training, and are more serious because if they aren't, they get dropped and then they're doomed. Our education system needs to have more teeth in it and actually fail people.
And, yes, the threat of failing a grade does actually get parents involved.
The number of days the kids at my son's school spend preparing for standardized tests is... ZERO.
No, really. The tests are so simple that they are literally considered a time-waster and a free day off by the staff. They cover everything already and more in the course of normal classes. The issue here isn't that the teachers are spending time teaching the wrong stuff, it's that the parents are idiots who aren't teaching anything at home. So what you end up with are two schools: The ones with decent test scores and grades where the tests are largely ignored and the others where schools serve as remedial classes to teach the basics. Often over and over again in a futile attempt to save and teach every last child. My son's school holds back idiots. There is no conveyor system between grades. The parents figure out right quick that it's their job to get a tutor if there's a problem.
There is a great shortage of decent teachers in the U.S. right now. If you are stuck in a situation having to teach as the OP described, then you need to move to a school where they don't have to waste time preparing for these standardized tests.
The government's solution to this should be even simpler. Any child who cannot pass (IIRC, it's something like 61%?) these tests is held back a year without exception. If that means we have a bunch of 20 year old seniors in high school in some districts, then so be it. Obviously, if it's just one area, remedial class in summer would suffice. Note - they do this is Japan and other nations already. You pass or you are held back. Add some teeth to it and watch the parents and teachers get involved again.
And that's how you know that the one in the article is fake. I can spot half a dozen problems from the picture alone, from the heavy gauge steel frame to the geometry and (well, the list is very long). It looks like something cobbled together in a garage by people who don't know how to do proper design.(at least use aluminum tubing to keep the weight down, fools) The British team, though, it looks like a proper purpose-built vehicle.
http://www.steamcar.co.uk/
Interesting reading.
Note - I do wish someone here at Slashdot would filter some of the articles for common sense and scientific validity. A lot of rubbish is getting through lately.
The glass that they made back then was highly opaque like stained glass, at best(and about as uniform). They simply lacked the technology to make anything remotely usable as either a lens or to make a functional mirror. That meant that they had to use polished metal(since we don't have any evidence of electroplating - and using sodium bicarbonate to clean and/or polish the silver is as best as they could have done)
(from glassonline.com)
"It was the Romans who began to use glass for architectural purposes, with the discovery of clear glass (through the introduction of manganese oxide) in Alexandria around AD 100. Cast glass windows, albeit with poor optical qualities, thus began to appear in the most important buildings in Rome and the most luxurious villas of Herculaneum and Pompeii."
The issue is that the technology to make clear glass simply wasn't something that they had at the time. Opaque glass was known (since about 1500BCE), but let's say he had the idea to use blown glass somehow (which would have been clear enough).
"A major breakthrough in glassmaking was the discovery of glassblowing some time between 27 BC and AD 14, attributed to Syrian craftsmen from the Sidon-Babylon area. The long thin metal tube used in the blowing process has changed very little since then. In the last century BC, the ancient Romans then began blowing glass inside moulds, greatly increasing the variety of shapes possible for hollow glass items."
Archimedes lived from 287 BC – c. 212 BC.
Mythbusters tried it, even with modern mirrors and simply failed. It would require modern materials and modern knowledge of math and science to achieve. As smart as he was, there's no way that he could have overcome all of the missing technology by himself.
A good analogy to this is Tesla's famous "death ray". Supposedly he figured out how to make a particle beam weapon in 1937. But scientists using computers and technology that he didn't have at the time have tried for roughly seven decades to come up with something like it. With no results. I suppose some day(apparently within 20-30 years) we'll have the ability to make something like that, but the fact remains that it will require technology that simply didn't exist back then.
It's not a matter of being clever. It's raw, hard science and engineering.
You need to have an incredibly uniform and shiny surface, even if you have the shape and physics correct. This means one of two things has to happen:
1 - You are using mirrors. This means that you need optically transparent glass. Unfortunately, their technology back then only allowed for essentially stained glass or the equivalent. (You can thank Egypt for this bit of technology, btw). So while they might have understood the concept, there was a massive technological hurdle to overcome.
2 - You could do it with coating a suitable surface with something highly reflective, but that would require electroplating it to achieve the uniformity and shine that you'd require. polished refined metal just isn't shiny enough(say, bronze plates or similar). While there is some evidence that they *might* have possibly used primitive batteries for electroplating, nothing suggests anything of this scale was ever devised. We don't even have examples of them using it for jewelery, let alone industrial scale siege machines.
My guess is that he created something like this to merely blind the enemies. Given that it would make you feel noticeably hotter in addition to blinding you and confusing you, a myth about it being a "death ray" seems likely given how superstitious people were back then.
Often they "Bust" something that they consider to be highly implausible or statistically unlikely even if there have been one or two cases of it actually happening. The show is focused upon "can this happen under normal or slightly abnormal circumstances" more than "if the right set of circumstances happen at the right time and everything goes as wrong as possible..."
But concerning the solar "death" ray, the real issue was that while you can easily make one out of modern materials, they didn't have modern mirrors or modern optics 2000 years ago. They've taken this into account.
Besides, where are you going to get to see a canon made out of duct tape?
There's nothing that says that Amazon has to play along with Apple, though. This move is as you stated, a money-grab by Apple. Apple gets 30% and Amazon gets the couple of percent that's left over. In the end, Jobs is back to the same tricks that eventually led to him being kicked out of Apple in the first place. Instead of embracing change and open standards, he's once again backing into the corner of proprietary technology and being a complete control freak.
It lost him the PC market and it will eventually lose him this market as well. Amazon and others won't play along and this will create a divide in the market. One which Apple will simply lose.
The rules have always been quite simple. You can do whatever you want with your PS3 as long as you don't go onto Sony's gaming network. Microsoft does the same thing with its Xbox Live - you play by the rules or not at all. The sheer number of people whining about this when it's standard boilerplate business practice to control access to your own servers and private network(s) is amazing. When you connect, it verifies that you aren't running any malicious code or hacks/cheats. This has been a staple of online anti-cheating software since the late 90s.
And, no cheating isn't controlled by having "better availability and providing value with a purchase a pirate cant get.", as one person wrote. It's entirely different in a console's case, since the games aren't pirated in the first place. Cheating in online games like this is controlled by making sure that everyone is using the same software and hardware. And, yes, the XBox does this already - they scan your machine and shut you down if you are caught cheating.
Concerning the source, this site really needs to hire someone to double-check new posts for basic common sense and validity before allowing it to.go live. IRC chat? Seriously?
Yet, suppose that you dug out a several mile cavern (or found a large set of caverns)? You simply can't do that in space. If there's heat, water, and light that we add, it being self-sustaining becomes much easier. There are plenty of examples of self-sustaining ecosystems on Earth that can be found in caves. Our idiocy is trying to build it all in a small sealed dome. Of course if you could make it several miles across it would be easier to accomplish.
Yes, it could be hit by a missile, but it also would have several days advanced notice of the incoming rocket. Which only a couple of nations have the ability to build. While a normal missile can hit a satellite, virtually none can send a decent sized payload as far as the Moon. If the main area is a few miles underground, nothing will penetrate anyways.
http://www.appletravel.cn/news-10166.html
So far, we've made a 20km cave here on Earth. All we have to do on the Moon is dig and dig some more. It can even be done by robots for the most part. Of course, if we could find a stable cave underground, it would simplify things greatly.
A base on the Moon is out of range of conventional missiles and weapons, allows for effortless spying, can be easily hardened against an attack, and if you build most of it underground, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem isn't that unreasonable as there's tons of room. Also, we are finding out that aside from the radiation and micro-meteorite blasted "eggshell" exterior layer, the Moon is pretty much normal rock and dirt underneath. There's even water and it appears to also have a small internal heat source/liquid core. So if we dig down deep enough, we'll have no issues with heat and/or power, either. Also, low gravity is dozens of times better for our bodies than none at all as all you'd have to do is wear weighted suits to keep your muscles in reasonable shape.
Space is a massive problem by comparison. One small nudge or one errant bit of debris and there's a hole and a massive problem. One small explosive or missile and it's doomed. A base on the Moon could easily be build as tough and as resistant to external forces as a typical bunker(if we're talking in the next hundred or so years as a "lifeboat") Remember, when it hits the fan, low orbit will be a literal ring of debris and exploded ordinance that will effectively stop us from even getting into space for a couple of decades. There's zero possibility that in a worst case scenario that they would not target everything and anything that their missiles could reach.
But using this as a platform to work your way to a base on the Moon is a viable plan. Oh, wait - China already says that it has plans for exactly this sort of thing.
We ran out of money and have nothing. We're *so* repeating the collapse of the British Empire that it's not funny any more. At this point, we simply should give up and maybe with the EU we can manage something together. Spending money on something that we can't possibly beat the Chinese in any more when we're about to go belly-up is simply absurd.
Our screwed up system here in the U.S. will only serve to send more and more scientists overseas to work where they can be free of this type of insanity.
I know that if I was a 25 year old who had a degree in biology or engineering, I'd make a bee-line to Asia. The insanity concerning IP, copyrights, non-disclosure contracts, and on and on, plus the impossibility to finding work in the U.S. right now. There's so much red tape to do anything in this country now that everyone simply has lost the will to do anything about it.
Tron in 2D would be like going to an airshow while you're recovering from eye surgery on one of your eyes.
Some movies are absolutely stunning in 3D, because they are done correctly. Tron didn't cause me a moment of eye-strain and I wear glasses (3D glasses are on top of my normal glasses).
Avatar was done correctly and is the only appliaction of the technology that does work That is:
1 - Digital. The displacement between the two images is on a per-pixel basis. This is too small for our eyes to easily discern. The image looks nearly identical with the glasses on and off from the perspective of focus.
2 - Depth only. Adding an artificial dimension towards the audience is going to cause eye problems, but using it to overcome the limitations of film's optics and limited depth of field is actually more what our eyes expect and our brains desire.
Maybe half a dozen films so far have taken this approach. The rest are the typical eye-strain junk that everyone complains about.
You're also forgetting whatever they are using for a medium to suspend it (ie - it's not in a vacuum?) That means there's also air, maybe water, and by the look of it, glass for the container, in the mix, which can possibly help to contribute. The real issue is, though, how fast does it use up the nickel (this appears to be a simple reaction instead of actual cold fusion) and is it cheaper than other power methods? If we're talking about hundreds of watt-hours for a pound of nickel, maybe it's viable. If it's, as I suspect, going to cost several dollars per KWH, then you might as well really be just burning wood as others have suggested.
The lack of industrial grade shielding in the lab suggests a simple reaction versus actual fusion, which would likely irradiate the entire room to certainly lethal levels. I know I wouldn't attempt to make such a machine without preparing a safe and radiation-resistant vessel.
Still, converting one element into another is a neat trick, even if it's not necessarily what they claim it to be. That's potentially more interesting in fact than the OP's article, it it is true.(and if it actually produces a stable isotope)
The article makes an all too typical assumption. That is, that it assumes that the effect is roughly linear. The problem is that, like they've found in Antarctica, if there is enough melting, three things can happen. One, the sheet can start to float, and two, as more pieces break off due to this effect, more ground is exposed which acts like a heat sink. LAstly, as the ice melts, the land itself rises out of the ocean, exacerbating the issue.
Combined with the fact that ice has essentially no transition phase between solid and liquid, what's ice a few degrees lower can literally ALL melt in a region in short order. 1 or 2 degrees hotter is a massive change as a result, and it won't even take 100 years at the rate its accelerating.
http://www.satimagingcorp.com/gallery/aster-greenland-ice-sheet.html
This is all too typical. Note the snow covered ground near the glacier and how it stays barren.
http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2009/02/antarctic_ices_american_inunda.html
Also, the water will rise significantly in the northern hemisphere because of the two combined effects. This accelerates the melting in Greenland even further.
One nice thing, though, is that real estate up there will be cheap and the climate will be somewhat viable to live in again. ;)
Perhaps he works as a crew member for Discovery Channel?
Though, someone could also argue that film or something taken with a camera could in theory be printed or used in a theater, where the limitations of a (now our only option) LCD display wouldn't apply.
But yes, if we're talking about computers, there's another limiting factor. We'd essentially need a whole new system from the ground up to take and utilize the images - aside from stuff like shooting movies and the like(which they already do for IMAX and similar).
What we need instead isn't HDR, but HCR. I hear that there is work on a 4-color sensor(as an example) that might provide more accurate colors, since you need at least one level higher than normal when converting from digital to analog as a rule to deal with conversion errors. If the colors can be made to look accurate under any lighting condition, the brightness will just cease to be a major issue. Or become just that - something to be adjusted after-wards.
Which brings me to the real point of this insanity surrounding "HDR".
Q: Why do we actually need HDR?
A: Because today's sensors for the most part use technology that makes the images look like junk in poor lighting conditions. Specifically, the colors are terrible and there's very little ability to deal with over-exposures. The range between "perfect image" and "junk" is a very small margin with not much leeway or forgiveness between the extremes.
The response so far has largely been to increase dynamic range to silly levels, but that's really useless if the colors are inaccurate a a result (or more likely in spite of it). The fundamental issue remains unresolved. GIGO, in other words.
What we really need is sensor technology that deals with colors in a better manner. So that when we are faced with instances where the shot would normally look bad or washed out, the sensor can deal with it and correct for it like our brain does. Fuji and Sigma have tried but their attempts have been so-so. We need to keep exploring new technologies like this, IMO, rather than just doing more and more tricks with software.
Well, that's somewhat true. A typical sensor will accurately capture all but about one F-stop higher and lower than human vision. That means that overblown super-HDR type movie poster or similar shots and the like aren't something that you should expect in any camera. Why it behaves like a HDR camera is because it doesn't hit 255 and just simply put solid white in the image when it gets over-exposed. A typical Bayer sensor will do this and there's nothing to be done about it - you hit that wall and you're done. There's nothing to recover at that point - the data just simply vanished.
The Fuji has two methods by which it does this. The first was the Super CCD SR with actually had dual sensors and took two shots at once at different f-stops and then blended them. The EXR version that they currently sell does pixel binning, which while it does create a slightly better dynamic range, it suffers from more interpolation issues (as one would expect) than a typical sensor. It works, but it's less than optimal in terms of color fidelity.
http://www.kenrockwell.com/fuji/s5/dynamic-range.htm
This is an older article, and he's a bit of a tool (has a hard-on for Nikon and hates anything but landscapes), but 2/3 the way down you can see a great example of this in action. Also, the color charts at the bottom show how it (and also Foveon/Sigma) sensor deals with bad contrast. Red goes to pink, then to white as you'd expect. At least in a far more gradual manner, with very little yellow. This means that the parts of the image that normally would require HDR or benefit from them have proper color balance/truer colors.
The Sigma doesn't have better dynamic range than a typical camera, but it does the same trick that our eyes do, which is that when the cones in our eyes get saturated, they do it in a gradual manner. This results in pictures that look overexposed like film - a nice soft shoulder at the extremes that can be recovered or dealt with in software. Is the Foveon/Sigma HDR? Well, sort of and sort of not. How it deals with colors is truer and resolutions are identical for each color. So it operates more like HDR for chroma and less for luminance. This is easiest to see in a Bayer sensor where purples and reds look fake and grainy when next to strong blue or green sources. Typically, unless you shoot very low light or black and white, better color fidelity is always the better choice.
And these are not some prototype sensors or custom application technologies, either. They sold millions of these units over the years. 2003 for the Fuji Super CCD technology and around the same time for the Foveon as well. That they've done precious little with it in the last (almost) decade is really unfortunate.
Two companies already dealt with this in the past, though they aren't doing as much with the technology as one would hope.
1 - Fuji has a sensor that does HDR already. Several years ago, in fact. It has two overlapping layers of sensors and takes two images at the same time, then blends that two together. Done, can buy it today. Just it isn't in use in a video camera yet(and their current camera doesn't do video very well)
2 - Foveon also has a different sensor approach where it is layered like film. This gives it the same dynamic range as our yes, or very close to it. It produces amazingly clean and beautiful images. But the resolution of the sensor is fairly low at about 4.5MP. Though, those are real full-color photosites (no interpolation or moire as ther is no "pattern" to the sensor), so it compares with a typical 10-12MP camera. Still, it's fairly low. Yes, their latest camera does do HD video, which is quite nice.
The OP can be forgiven, though, as these two companies spend almost nothing on advertising these two technologies. I'd wager that only one in 20 or 30 people who are interested photography and video (that I talk to) even are aware of them. A normal person just simply doesn't know at all.