Naw. The obvious thing to do is for the democrats to write a virus that causes the republicans to win by a vast margin. The results of the election would be overturned, the republicans would suffer a massive backlash...
If so, it will be interesting to see whether history judges it to have been worth it. I would think that there are immediate problems down here on earth that need to be solved and spending lots of money on a really interesting dream may not be the best way to allocate scarce resources...
Feh, almost every significant advancement by humanity has occurred when people spent a lot of scant resources on a really interesting dream.
I've just got to disagree with you on your opinion of the obselescence of film.:) While digital -is- becoming the de facto ruler in news and sports photography, in areas such as modelling, 'fine art', stock photography, and, well, a lot of other areas, film is still the standard.
In black and white photography, the number of people who adhere to film and a wet darkroom is even greater -- there's just a certain look that you get from a silver print that isn't quite the same with even the best scan and print.
There are quite a lot of photographers who are switching to film backed by a digital darkroom for doing prints, but the number of pure-digital photographic artists out there is still, I think, a minority.
So, I dunno. Wet-darkroom work might be more analagous to someone who likes tube amps, but I wouldn't put it quite in the same league as people who make their own soap from fat and lye.:)
The saltpetre one was one thing that stumped me for a while, but the answer is that it can be refined from "poudre" -- fermented human waste. You can also get it from other sources of aged waste -- bat and ghicken guano, etc.
But when it comes down to it, you need shit to make explosives.
The thing is, I can't really consider modern darkroom skills to be in the same archaeic class as, say, brewing or soapmaking. For one thing, photo skills are actually rather common. For another, it's pretty much just mixing pre-made chemicals, using modern, extremely convenient, high-speed films and multi-grade papers...
Now, you wanna get real old-school, you wind up smoking your own plates with vaporized mercury and mixing up highly toxic developing solutions (such as Pyro, which actually does have a following in some circles) by hand from bottles of reagents....In this case, sticking to the modern methods is, IMO, the smart thing to do.;)
Oh -- if you haven't learned how to do it yet, look up info on split-filter printing -- that is, using multiple filters on the same print. It can really make a difference.
I think we have to find a way to build an AI that finds its own algorythms -- self-programming is, to me, the basic, essential quality for what I consider to be a "real" AI.
Socialism has been around since the dawn of time. There have been capitalistic aspects to most of human interaction, but the evolution of capitalism as a social system is a very recent thing.
Most societies through time have been more socialistic than capitalistic, including many of the largest ones. And almost all of the smallest.
Yeah, but one scratch to a CD or DVD, or a HD crash, or your stupid kid deleting the wrong thing, can wipe out hundreds or thousands of pics. That's it, poof, irrevocably gone for most people, though some might be able to pay for the extremely expensive work of data salvagers.
The only way that photographs and negs can be wiped out on such a large scale would be fire or flood -- and even in that case, a lot could survive.
On the other hand, you need to power your computer -- which may be anything from an energy-sipping laptop to a 500W PSU beast with a 21" monitor while you're looking at those pics. Most photo printers have a high initial cost and high cost-per-copy, and the images are, in my experience, less permanant than those in photographs.
Also, memory cards are expensive, and if you're caught without a spare, or something to offload images to, you're SOL. With film, just pop the old canister out, load a new one in, and voila, ready to go.
I will say that for typical snapshot use, digital's better environmentally, because people won't be printing out all the CRAP which is most of what they -- what anyone, including artists -- take. On the other hand, if you use slide film, the same can be said, and if you develop B&W on your own, ditto.
Also, your digital camera will be going through a lot more batteries than a film camera would, even one with a motor drive and auto-focus and such. Batteries contain all sorts of nasty heavy metals, most of which wind up in garbage dumps, regulations aside, whereas most photochemicals are disposed of according to local regulations.
True. However, a good 'cheap' camera body -- say, a nikkon FM-10 -- can take pictures which come out just as well as those taken by the most expensive 35 mm camera body on the market, so long as they're using the same lenses.
And actually, you'd probably get the better picture from the plastic lenses and 200-speed film -- provided you exposed it properly, which is the real bitch with those little cameras -- than you would from 1000-speed film and good glass, if you're going to blow it up to 8x10 or beyond.
Basically, the dynamic range of film is measured in stops, from the highest level to the lowest level. Each 'stop' up is half of the light than the one below it. So, slide film, which I think is comprable to good digital film, covers something like 5 stops. If the part of your image that shows up as 'black' on the film has an arbitrary luminosity of, say, 1 candella, in real life, then the highest it could capture would be 2^5, or 32 candella.
If you were using a good B&W film, that difference might be 10 stops. So that's from 1-1024. Understand? I know I've done a crappy job explaining it.
Basically, when you go to capture an image, you capture a range of light, centered around what you set the camera to see as neutral. If that range is small, things don't have to get much darker or lighter before they start showing up as zero-information areas, pure white or pure black.
The kind of copying device that you talk about exists, but it can't do anything about the information which wasn't recorded in an image, which is what the dynamic range is all about.
Also, you can play about with the dynamic range of photo film, contracting or expanding it, depending on how you shoot and develop the film. That's harder to do with digital, at least when it comes to expansion.
this [tawbaware.com] out for example (check these 5 composite images)
I'm not very impressed. The same thing could be done in a darkroom. Admittedly, it's much easier with photoshop.
Also, while perhaps digital cameras can match slide film, or come close to color film in dynamic range, they sure don't compare to B&W -- I think Kodak says its Tri-X covers 10 or 11 stops. I also don't think it would be possible to use the 'zone system' kind of development with a digital camera -- they simply lose either the high or low end information; you can't push or pull digital images. Dodging and burning just isn't the same.
A good darkroom set-up gives nothing like the loss encountered with video tape re-recording, and the most common effects done in a darkroom -- dodging and burning -- don't affect image quality. Also, good-quality filters do not significantly affect the quality of the image.
With a decent -- not great -- enlarger in my college photo lab, I can enlarge a 35mm neg to, hell, 16x20 or whatever, and I can use a grain focuser to get the grains sharply and clearly in focus. The loss of quality in this case is utterly negligible.
Negs don't degrade at any appreciable rate once they've been developed properly. And there's no analog-digital-analog transition, which is one of the big things that kills the kinds of copies you're talking about. I can pull an infinite number of prints off of a negative and they'll all look as good as the first one I pulled off of it.
Oh, yeah, another reason why the video analogy isn't accurate in this case: photographs are produced optically. Electromagnetic radiation doesn't do squat to the light that copies them. However, there's all sorts of radio and EM interference that can't be eliminated that degrades copies of videos.
These computers are going to be crippled with uber-restrictive copy control stuff, will be moderately expensive, and probably won't perform as well as a standard PC to boot.
Could it be that HP and MS are dooming it to fail, in order to weaken the platform of the MPAA/RIAA/Content Control zealots?
Take a look at EVE -- www.eve-online.com. E&B is Everquest in space (I'm in the beta too -- it's fun, but it's not something that's going to hold my attention.) EVE is something completely new and utterly un-EQ like.
"One Gravity", that is, "One Gee" has NOTHING to do with the affect of gravity on an object, other than that its value is the downward acceleration that an object undergoes when it's at sea level on earth due to gravity. It is a measure of accelleration. Saying that an object is accellerating at one gee is saying that it's accellerating at 9.8 meters per second. It doesn't matter how close or how far away from any other objects it is.
Not really. Codeine isn't as evil as people think. In most civilized countries you can buy tylenol with codeine OTC.
It's a great, low-impact but powerful painkiller with useful side-effects -- it helps clear up congestion and diarrhea, which in kiddie-illnesses, are almost always present.
It's also cheap.
I used to get a bottle codeine cough syrup from my allergist because I'd get, every winter, bad upper respiratory coughs and nasty post-nasal drip that'd make my throat feel like hell. That syrup made life liveable when I came down with it, and a bottle generally lasted the winter.
Then I got a new doctor who wouldn't prescribe the Evil Narcotics -- instead of a $20 bottle of stuff I'd be paying for a $60 bottle of stuff that didn't work as well. It took a lot to convince him to give me the codeine.:P
Plus, faking $1 bills will only loose you money, or the profit margin will be very very slim indeed. If you're going to fake US currency, the $20 is the best bet, since it's the largest bill in circulation that isn't regularly checked for counterfiting and it's also one of the most commonly used bills out there...
Slashdot Mirror
Naw. The obvious thing to do is for the democrats to write a virus that causes the republicans to win by a vast margin. The results of the election would be overturned, the republicans would suffer a massive backlash...
Feh, almost every significant advancement by humanity has occurred when people spent a lot of scant resources on a really interesting dream.
I've just got to disagree with you on your opinion of the obselescence of film. :) While digital -is- becoming the de facto ruler in news and sports photography, in areas such as modelling, 'fine art', stock photography, and, well, a lot of other areas, film is still the standard.
:)
In black and white photography, the number of people who adhere to film and a wet darkroom is even greater -- there's just a certain look that you get from a silver print that isn't quite the same with even the best scan and print.
There are quite a lot of photographers who are switching to film backed by a digital darkroom for doing prints, but the number of pure-digital photographic artists out there is still, I think, a minority.
So, I dunno. Wet-darkroom work might be more analagous to someone who likes tube amps, but I wouldn't put it quite in the same league as people who make their own soap from fat and lye.
The saltpetre one was one thing that stumped me for a while, but the answer is that it can be refined from "poudre" -- fermented human waste. You can also get it from other sources of aged waste -- bat and ghicken guano, etc.
But when it comes down to it, you need shit to make explosives.
The thing is, I can't really consider modern darkroom skills to be in the same archaeic class as, say, brewing or soapmaking. For one thing, photo skills are actually rather common. For another, it's pretty much just mixing pre-made chemicals, using modern, extremely convenient, high-speed films and multi-grade papers...
...In this case, sticking to the modern methods is, IMO, the smart thing to do. ;)
Now, you wanna get real old-school, you wind up smoking your own plates with vaporized mercury and mixing up highly toxic developing solutions (such as Pyro, which actually does have a following in some circles) by hand from bottles of reagents.
Oh -- if you haven't learned how to do it yet, look up info on split-filter printing -- that is, using multiple filters on the same print. It can really make a difference.
I think we have to find a way to build an AI that finds its own algorythms -- self-programming is, to me, the basic, essential quality for what I consider to be a "real" AI.
;)
Of course, this is a royal bitch.
Socialism has been around since the dawn of time. There have been capitalistic aspects to most of human interaction, but the evolution of capitalism as a social system is a very recent thing.
Most societies through time have been more socialistic than capitalistic, including many of the largest ones. And almost all of the smallest.
Yeah, but one scratch to a CD or DVD, or a HD crash, or your stupid kid deleting the wrong thing, can wipe out hundreds or thousands of pics. That's it, poof, irrevocably gone for most people, though some might be able to pay for the extremely expensive work of data salvagers.
The only way that photographs and negs can be wiped out on such a large scale would be fire or flood -- and even in that case, a lot could survive.
On the other hand, you need to power your computer -- which may be anything from an energy-sipping laptop to a 500W PSU beast with a 21" monitor while you're looking at those pics. Most photo printers have a high initial cost and high cost-per-copy, and the images are, in my experience, less permanant than those in photographs.
Also, memory cards are expensive, and if you're caught without a spare, or something to offload images to, you're SOL. With film, just pop the old canister out, load a new one in, and voila, ready to go.
I will say that for typical snapshot use, digital's better environmentally, because people won't be printing out all the CRAP which is most of what they -- what anyone, including artists -- take. On the other hand, if you use slide film, the same can be said, and if you develop B&W on your own, ditto.
Also, your digital camera will be going through a lot more batteries than a film camera would, even one with a motor drive and auto-focus and such. Batteries contain all sorts of nasty heavy metals, most of which wind up in garbage dumps, regulations aside, whereas most photochemicals are disposed of according to local regulations.
Personally, I think they come out about even.
Well, actually, you technically could get resolution on the near-molecular level.
;)
That'd be some damned slow film, though.
True. However, a good 'cheap' camera body -- say, a nikkon FM-10 -- can take pictures which come out just as well as those taken by the most expensive 35 mm camera body on the market, so long as they're using the same lenses.
And actually, you'd probably get the better picture from the plastic lenses and 200-speed film -- provided you exposed it properly, which is the real bitch with those little cameras -- than you would from 1000-speed film and good glass, if you're going to blow it up to 8x10 or beyond.
Basically, the dynamic range of film is measured in stops, from the highest level to the lowest level. Each 'stop' up is half of the light than the one below it. So, slide film, which I think is comprable to good digital film, covers something like 5 stops. If the part of your image that shows up as 'black' on the film has an arbitrary luminosity of, say, 1 candella, in real life, then the highest it could capture would be 2^5, or 32 candella.
If you were using a good B&W film, that difference might be 10 stops. So that's from 1-1024. Understand? I know I've done a crappy job explaining it.
Basically, when you go to capture an image, you capture a range of light, centered around what you set the camera to see as neutral. If that range is small, things don't have to get much darker or lighter before they start showing up as zero-information areas, pure white or pure black.
The kind of copying device that you talk about exists, but it can't do anything about the information which wasn't recorded in an image, which is what the dynamic range is all about.
Also, you can play about with the dynamic range of photo film, contracting or expanding it, depending on how you shoot and develop the film. That's harder to do with digital, at least when it comes to expansion.
this [tawbaware.com] out for example (check these 5 composite images)
I'm not very impressed. The same thing could be done in a darkroom. Admittedly, it's much easier with photoshop.
Also, while perhaps digital cameras can match slide film, or come close to color film in dynamic range, they sure don't compare to B&W -- I think Kodak says its Tri-X covers 10 or 11 stops. I also don't think it would be possible to use the 'zone system' kind of development with a digital camera -- they simply lose either the high or low end information; you can't push or pull digital images. Dodging and burning just isn't the same.
A good darkroom set-up gives nothing like the loss encountered with video tape re-recording, and the most common effects done in a darkroom -- dodging and burning -- don't affect image quality. Also, good-quality filters do not significantly affect the quality of the image.
With a decent -- not great -- enlarger in my college photo lab, I can enlarge a 35mm neg to, hell, 16x20 or whatever, and I can use a grain focuser to get the grains sharply and clearly in focus. The loss of quality in this case is utterly negligible.
Negs don't degrade at any appreciable rate once they've been developed properly. And there's no analog-digital-analog transition, which is one of the big things that kills the kinds of copies you're talking about. I can pull an infinite number of prints off of a negative and they'll all look as good as the first one I pulled off of it.
Oh, yeah, another reason why the video analogy isn't accurate in this case: photographs are produced optically. Electromagnetic radiation doesn't do squat to the light that copies them. However, there's all sorts of radio and EM interference that can't be eliminated that degrades copies of videos.
Bash it with a rock until the discman comes apart.
These computers are going to be crippled with uber-restrictive copy control stuff, will be moderately expensive, and probably won't perform as well as a standard PC to boot.
Could it be that HP and MS are dooming it to fail, in order to weaken the platform of the MPAA/RIAA/Content Control zealots?
www.eve-online.com
The next, best hope for an actual MMPO with real RPG
Take a look at EVE -- www.eve-online.com. E&B is Everquest in space (I'm in the beta too -- it's fun, but it's not something that's going to hold my attention.) EVE is something completely new and utterly un-EQ like.
"BTW 1 gravity = 1 force, eg 1 lb * gravity = 1 lb force." ...No. A pound is a measure of weight, not mass, and thus it's influenced by gravity.
"One Gravity", that is, "One Gee" has NOTHING to do with the affect of gravity on an object, other than that its value is the downward acceleration that an object undergoes when it's at sea level on earth due to gravity. It is a measure of accelleration. Saying that an object is accellerating at one gee is saying that it's accellerating at 9.8 meters per second. It doesn't matter how close or how far away from any other objects it is.
...Well, this'll be a first for me if I actually make it in in time...
Not for nothing, but what is this if not a condensed and easy-to-use access to the 'literature'?
Not really. Codeine isn't as evil as people think. In most civilized countries you can buy tylenol with codeine OTC.
:P
It's a great, low-impact but powerful painkiller with useful side-effects -- it helps clear up congestion and diarrhea, which in kiddie-illnesses, are almost always present.
It's also cheap.
I used to get a bottle codeine cough syrup from my allergist because I'd get, every winter, bad upper respiratory coughs and nasty post-nasal drip that'd make my throat feel like hell. That syrup made life liveable when I came down with it, and a bottle generally lasted the winter.
Then I got a new doctor who wouldn't prescribe the Evil Narcotics -- instead of a $20 bottle of stuff I'd be paying for a $60 bottle of stuff that didn't work as well. It took a lot to convince him to give me the codeine.
Plus, faking $1 bills will only loose you money, or the profit margin will be very very slim indeed. If you're going to fake US currency, the $20 is the best bet, since it's the largest bill in circulation that isn't regularly checked for counterfiting and it's also one of the most commonly used bills out there...
:)
Just a little FYI.
What, where they try out all of the nuclear weapons? :)