ISBNs aren't worth $125, and they never were. They're priced that high to discourage people from buying them in such small quantities, because doing so is almost always a mistake, and results in lots of extra overhead because of the added segmentation of the address space.
The reason it is a mistake can be summarized by describing how I'll be using ISBNs for each of the three books I'm about to publish:
One ISBN for the hardcover print edition.
One ISBN for the paperback print edition.
One ISBN for the EPUB digital edition.
One ISBN for the Amazon (MOBI/KF8) digital edition (optional).
One ISBN for the PDF digital edition (sometimes optional, depending on merchant).
So each book in my trilogy could eat up to half of a block of ten by itself. Most folks should not be buying in blocks smaller than 10, and if you're serious about writing more than one or two books, in blocks of 100.
That said, $125 for an ISBN is only "very expensive" in a country where the average person spends less than $125 for a bag of groceries. Which ain't this one.
Shrugs. For me, the question is: block of 100 or block of 1,000. My first project, a trilogy of three novels, will require at least nine ISBNs, or 12 if I assign an ISBN to the Kindle edition (which is optional), so a block of 10 would be stupid unless I plan to never create any future works. A block of 100 would probably take care of any future projects that I would want to do, but a block of 1,000 would be sufficient beyond all doubt, and costs less than twice as much as a block of 100.
On the flip side, if everyone thought as I did, the ISBN system would break pretty quickly through exhaustion of the Bookland EAN space. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is left as a question for debate.
Freepository is a reliable solution if you are willing to shell out some cash. I think they stopped their free offering sometime back, but plans start from $9/month if your contributers are limited in number.
Perhaps in light of not being free, they should change their prefix. Might I recommend "sup". It's short for supported.:-D
Err... a few months ago. This is what happens when you say "couple of" and then decide that five or six months stretches the meaning of that phrase a bit too much. *sigh*
I'm pretty sure it would take less time to programmatically build an Objective-C UI than it does to do HTML/CSS, too, though I'll admit I haven't done much of that. HTML/CSS has more moving parts, but not the right moving parts for building user interfaces.
With a Cocoa or UIKit UI, you get to define how objects stretch, how they are aligned, etc. Everything is designed under the assumption that element size can change, and the layout must do something sensible.
With HTML/CSS, in contrast, you have to either hard-code positions of elements (and write your own layout code in JavaScript to accommodate scrolling and window size changes) or you get to deal with elements in a linear flow. Flow-based layouts are great for laying out pages of text (which is what HTML/CSS was designed for), but they are completely antithetical to designing user interfaces, and thus any UI built atop it is inherently fragile by design.
Heck, CSS didn't even have the concept of viewport-relative units until fairly recently, and Firefox just got support for them a few of months ago. And the calc() operation and box-sizing: border-box features have only gotten support fairly recently as well, without which the standard box model is broken almost beyond repair for UI purposes.
And don't get me started on the HTML editing parts of HTML5. I could rant for hours on all the bugs I've run into in that area.
IMO, doing HTML/CSS actually feels appreciably clumsier than my experience writing X11 code (Xlib-level), which is really saying something, because that's a pain in the ***.
I think that the thought is that with the addition of NaCl apps, WebGL, and WebRTC on a fast enough machine, that you can have most of those apps in a sandboxed environment. And there is merit to that... considering how many people now use their tablet as their primary device.
Not really. I'm pretty sure there's a graveyard somewhere with the bones of all the companies who thought a browser would make a perfectly good OS and did not realize their mistake in time.
Odds are good that Chrome OS will fail to gain significant traction for exactly the same reason: HTML and CSS are really, really terrible for complicated user interfaces. Things that take fifteen seconds in Interface Builder can take hours or even days to do correctly with HTML/CSS, assuming you're designing to accommodate variably sized browser windows. And making what rightfully ought to be a tiny design change can force you to do a massive redesign of the CSS and HTML.
Speaking as somebody who has written some pretty complex web apps over the years, I've concluded that the state of web UIs is so horribly primitive compared with the state of native UIs in terms of the amount of effort required to get a usable result, and the documentation for the various toolkits is so mind-bogglingly poor compared with docs for pretty much any of the native UI systems, that I can't imagine anybody being crazy enough to think a web-based OS would succeed, particularly after Apple AND Palm/HP tried it and concluded that it wasn't practical.
This is, of course, the 9th circuit, where you'd pretty much expect this result from an en banc review (which for the 9th circuit probably means a limited en banc review by 11 judges, because I don't think all 29 judges have ever reviewed anything). The only way I could see them going the other way is if it were merely a three-judge panel with some of the most conservative judges on that court.
Why should copyrighted work get special treatment just because it doesn't follow the rules of decay? This should be shouted as a triumph, not lamented as a loss to creativity.
Simply put, because decay is the only thing that makes nontrivial copyright duration (beyond the time it takes to read or watch something once) meaningful.
With decay, there is a nonzero cost per consumer, because eventually the media fails and must be replaced. That cost, small as it might be, produces much of the content creator's profit margin for nearly the entire copyright term.
Take away the decay, and hundreds (or, at most, thousands) of copies of that creation can adequately service the needs of the entire world, because that's how many people are likely to be listening to the same song, reading the same book, or watching the same movie at any given moment. The world need only obtain additional copies up to that point, and once enough copies are obtained, those copies could be transferred instantly from a shared pool to whoever wanted to consume that work at that moment. This would effectively mean that no creative work would ever pay back the cost of its creation unless the creator charged hundreds or even thousands of dollars per copy, which is expensive enough that no one would buy them.
I don't disagree at a conceptual level. However, much like my views on capital punishment, this is where I have to let actual real-life outcomes overrule academic theorising. There's always going to be a far larger cohort of "deadbeat dads" than there are women getting pregnant for such purposes.
If you mean deadbeat after the fact (the guy moving out a few months later), then appropriate time limits should render that problem largely moot.
If you mean deadbeat to mean somebody who doesn't bother to use protection and then doesn't call, then I would argue that the blame falls equally on both parties for that decision, and that those situations aren't really different from any other case of unwanted pregnancy. Those folks are unlikely to pay child support anyway, so there's a very high probability that (no matter what the law or the courts say) the mother will end up taking full responsibility for that child's welfare. So it isn't so much letting these people off the hook as acknowledging the reality of the situation and encouraging the women in question to place those kids in a good home with a family who will be better able to take care of them. Those situations are particularly good candidates for open adoption, assuming they can find a willing family.
Despite conservatives' sadistic fantasies about women being filicidal maniacs held back only by anti-abortion laws, in realty the vast, vast majority of women find an abortion to be a significant and often traumatic process. Even when it's not surgical - though the physical effects of using RU486 aren't exactly benign.
Emotionally, sure. I was solely talking about the risk to the health of the person involved (infertility, fatal infections, etc.), which for drug-induced abortions are, AFAIK, fairly similar to a miscarriage in terms of the harm to the mother. That said, I haven't studied the subject in depth, so I could be wrong. The emotional harm from abortions, for most people, is considerable, hence the reason that I would consider adoption to be almost invariably a better choice.
No, that's recognition of the reality that a woman has a lot more at stake in a pregnancy than a man.
Up until the moment of birth, yes, but that's only 9 months out of the 18.75 years in which the parents are responsible for that child. For the other 18 years, both parents' roles are equal, and given that statistically, men make more money than women (even in the same jobs at the same companies), you could even argue that the father plays a greater role for the remaining 18 years. You can't just look at the first nine months in isolation, because the decision of whether to abort a child, give that child up for adoption, or keep that child continues to shape the lives of both parents for a lot longer than that.
From an ethical perspective, there's actually something to be said about giving the father the right to terminate child support if the father objected to the mother keeping the baby prior to its birth. Here's why: There's a small minority of women who, when a relationship is on the rocks, stop taking birth control pills in the hopes that having a baby will fix the relationship. If the father had a legally enshrined right to say, "Give the baby up for adoption or I won't be obligated to pay any child support," those sorts of pregnancies would be significantly rarer, and the abortions that often follow a few months later would also be significantly rarer.
Indeed. One person cannot force another to undergo an invasive and traumatic medical procedure. Truly they are being oppressed ! On the flipside, a woman who does not want children cannot force her husband to have a vasectomy or be castrated, so it seems that balances out.
Not really a fair comparison. One is a procedure that ends a single pregnancy, the other is a largely permanent procedure that ends the possibility of future pregnancies. For that matter, non-surgical abortions (RU-486) have been legal in the U.S. for more than a decade, so it's more on the same scale as forcing a man to take Viagra.
Not that I'm advocating abortion, mind you—personally, I think it should be avoided to the maximum extent possible—but if you're going to make an argument from a safety perspective, it ought to at least be a valid argument. For example, there's a much stronger case for allowing a woman to abort an child without the father's consent, given that there are very real safety risks associated with having a baby, and very real safety risks with telling some men (the abusive kind) that you're going to abort their baby.
What they didn't report on is that even military intervention is such an extreme reaction to anything that it's generally not anything we have to worry about. It's an extremely extraordinary circumstance, the weight of which is lost in the cultural zeitgeist.
The reason it wasn't reported on is that the unusualness of the circumstances in which it might be appropriate is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is Holder's unwillingness to define a position on the subject, and his unwillingness to define any sort of bounds on the situations in which such attacks would be appropriate.
The answer to whether drone strikes against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil are legal is almost always a very resounding "No", because of the Posse Comitatus Act, several of the amendments in the bill of rights, and probably half a dozen other reasons. The only situation in which it might even remotely be legal would be if we were in a state of war, Congress had suspended habeas corpus, and forces that included U.S. citizens were actively waging war against the United States. In other words, nothing short of a second U.S. Civil War would be grounds for such an action. And if he had stated it that way, I would have been okay with it, because those bounds would make it clear why such strikes are unlikely to ever occur.
But he didn't do that. He hedged. He refused to give an answer to what should have been a simple question, and in my experience, that is almost always a sign of deliberate deception—as though he won't answer it because he suspects that it will happen, and soon. In fact, were it not for my natural assumption that any such action would likely have been noticed and reported by someone, his reaction would have been enough to make me suspect that perhaps such a drone attack on U.S. soil had already happened, maybe as an inadvertent border patrol action.
This isn't going to go away. The U.S. needs clear policies on the use of drones within our borders, both for military use and for law enforcement use. And until that happens, people with fringe agendas like Rand Paul are going to continue getting far more air time than they rightfully deserve.
What I find most amusing is that they're allowing knives that are too small to be useful, but not allowing any real pocketknives. That Leatherman multi-tool that all you geeks carry around? The blade is almost certainly too long by about half an inch.
It is almost as though the TSA deliberately designed this program to eliminate any sort of knife that has any useful purpose beyond cutting through the clear tape on shipping boxes.
In almost every case it is acceptable to use a comma before "and". In the case of a series, it's a Harvard/Oxford/serial comma (and is either present or absent, depending on the editorial style of whoever you're writing for). In the case of a compound sentence, it is required. And in the case of a compound predicate (as in this sentence), it is considered optional. As a rule, you should not use a comma in a compound predicate unless the sentence is fairly complex. I probably would not have put in that comma, but I also probably would not have objected if someone else had put it in.
The only situation I can think of in which it is actually wrong (as opposed to being required or being a style issue) to use a comma before the word "and" is when you're writing a simple series of two things, e.g. "The boy, and girl went to the store."
It's right there. It's a crime against the constitution for the government to kill a US Citizen, on US Soil, without due process.
Allow me to point out some other things that are in the Constitution:
Use taxes are effectively a sales tax on interstate commerce, which falls into the powers granted solely to the federal government. The Supreme Court upheld them because apparently nobody cares if something fails the duck test anymore.
Searches of your personal papers without a warrant are unconstitutional, yet every day, LEOs violate that. Somehow those papers existing electronically makes them special, for no reason other than because that makes it more convenient for the government.
Habeas Corpus cannot be suspended except under certain extreme circumstances, and the Bill of Rights guarantees the right to a speedy trial. Yet there are people in a Guantanamo Bay right now who have not gotten a trial after more than a decade.
And so on. The fact of the matter is that you only have the rights that you are willing to defend. If we as a society are unwilling to vote the bums out for defiling the Constitution, then that becomes the new normal. Worse, because justices change over time, newer justices who see these abuses as normal will have less reason to question the next set of abuses. Over the generations, this results in an almost unstoppable march towards tyranny. The slippery slope is very real. It just takes several generations to be fully realized.
Of course, historically speaking, things always eventually get to a point where the masses revolt and form a new government designed to protect them from the abuses of the past, usually by ensuring that the worst usurpers are the first against the wall. However, just as inevitably, that new government eventually gets perverted over the decades or centuries until it looks a lot like what they had before. Rinse, repeat. And this pattern pretty much describes all governments throughout history.
Sadly, there is one truth, and that is this: that which you are unwilling to defend will be taken away from you. If you value freedom, you must be willing to act against those who would take it away—casting your vote, running for office, and so on. If you do not do that, then you have no rights, and no piece of paper is ever going to change that.
I think you missed my point. There's no law that says the mirror must have only a single pivot point. You could make a mirror that pivots in the middle, for example, and mount a second sensor down near the bottom of the camera. So in normal mode, the mirror flips up and exposes the sensor, and in low-light mode, the mirror flips 90 degrees and reflects the light down instead of up. Because a 45 degree mirror preserves the distance from each pixel to the lens, the only thing you'd have to do is vertically flip the resulting image, which is trivial to do in software.
Of course, it would be beneficial for the mirror in such a design to be double-sided so that the face that becomes part of the optical path for the second sensor would be moderately protected from scratches and dust. You would probably also want some sort of flip-down or slide-in black cover over the second sensor so that it would not produce reflections of off-axis light on the main sensor (which could remain continuously in the covered position until the second sensor is needed). None of those design constraints seems particularly insurmountable (or even all that difficult) mechanically, though, unless there's something subtle that I'm missing.
As for having multiple bodies, I do, but since I'm not shooting professionally, I usually leave my spare back in the hotel room. If my main camera body fails, I can always fall back on my iPhone. Sure, that's less than ideal, but it just isn't worth carrying around that much extra bulk. My lenses are heavy enough to be obnoxious by themselves without adding an extra 1.25 pounds for a spare body.
Imagine a conference room with a salesman, a CEO and a bunch of politicians. Who do you propose they use to check whether the machine is actually capable of giving a negative?
The schmuck they had to pull into the room to help them find the "on" button.
Computer: I see you hate your job and hate your boss with a borderline psychopathic myopia, and you think that all the people around you are idiots who don't deserve to breathe your air. You have been added to the handgun watch list out of an abundance of caution.
What really annoys me is the absolute limit of what I can do to these bastards is not give them money. There needs to be a way to take money away from companies that deliver exceptionally bad products.
There's no limit to how much money you can take away from them if you buy the product and can convince the jury that you were irreparably harmed by it.:-D
Alternatively, there's no limit to how much damage you can do if you encourage people to post negative reviews on Amazon. Most sane people will think twice before buying a product whose reviews look like this:
1.5 out of 5 stars
5 star: (17)
4 star: (8)
3 star: (11)
2 star: (15)
1 star: (191)
EA has RUINED it with the persistent DRM that prevents you from saving your game to your computer. ”
KiloEchoNovember | 92 reviewers made a similar statement
Unless EA starts astroturfing to bring the ratings up, I suspect this game is pretty much doomed to be a total bust, at least as far as sales on Amazon are concerned. You don't just "get over" that strong a negative reaction to your product.
And if enough folks posted such consistently harsh reviews at every game review site, every store site, etc., then companies like EA would have exactly two choices at their disposal: correct their craniorectal inversion or go out of business. That's the nice thing about online shopping: by putting lots of information about the product at your fingertips, it forces companies to compete on quality instead of just competing on price.
Why don't you just get an old 35mm DSLR with a lower pixel count?
Because other aspects of CCD technology have improved significantly since then, like the advent of back-illuminated CCDs. Given that they are designed for astronomy purposes, I suspect these CCDs are back-illuminated, which results in significantly lower noise. They might also be Peltier-cooled, which further reduces the thermal noise component of that noise floor. And even if these chips are neither of those things, I'd expect the noise floor to still be much lower than an older DSLR because of other advances.
What I'd like to see is a DSLR in which the mirror can flip in a different direction to expose one of these sensors under ultra-low-light conditions. That way you could choose, at the time you are taking the shot, whether to prioritize resolution or light gathering.
Maybe they took the time to actually present real evidence of harm this time.:-)
In my quick skim of the subject, it didn't look like the courts held much of anything beyond that the people bringing the case failed to provide enough evidence for it to actually go to trial.
That is to say that they did not hold that those things did not injure competition, but rather that those things did not inherently injure competition, and that without further evidence to support the claim of injury, the prosecution presented insufficient grounds for the suit to proceed.
Did I miss a subsequent, more solid decision on the subject?
Slashdot Mirror
With a capital SLAPP.
Wait, I thought this guy was a Jesuit....
ISBNs aren't worth $125, and they never were. They're priced that high to discourage people from buying them in such small quantities, because doing so is almost always a mistake, and results in lots of extra overhead because of the added segmentation of the address space.
The reason it is a mistake can be summarized by describing how I'll be using ISBNs for each of the three books I'm about to publish:
So each book in my trilogy could eat up to half of a block of ten by itself. Most folks should not be buying in blocks smaller than 10, and if you're serious about writing more than one or two books, in blocks of 100.
Shrugs. For me, the question is: block of 100 or block of 1,000. My first project, a trilogy of three novels, will require at least nine ISBNs, or 12 if I assign an ISBN to the Kindle edition (which is optional), so a block of 10 would be stupid unless I plan to never create any future works. A block of 100 would probably take care of any future projects that I would want to do, but a block of 1,000 would be sufficient beyond all doubt, and costs less than twice as much as a block of 100.
On the flip side, if everyone thought as I did, the ISBN system would break pretty quickly through exhaustion of the Bookland EAN space. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is left as a question for debate.
Perhaps in light of not being free, they should change their prefix. Might I recommend "sup". It's short for supported. :-D
Err... a few months ago. This is what happens when you say "couple of" and then decide that five or six months stretches the meaning of that phrase a bit too much. *sigh*
I'm pretty sure it would take less time to programmatically build an Objective-C UI than it does to do HTML/CSS, too, though I'll admit I haven't done much of that. HTML/CSS has more moving parts, but not the right moving parts for building user interfaces.
With a Cocoa or UIKit UI, you get to define how objects stretch, how they are aligned, etc. Everything is designed under the assumption that element size can change, and the layout must do something sensible.
With HTML/CSS, in contrast, you have to either hard-code positions of elements (and write your own layout code in JavaScript to accommodate scrolling and window size changes) or you get to deal with elements in a linear flow. Flow-based layouts are great for laying out pages of text (which is what HTML/CSS was designed for), but they are completely antithetical to designing user interfaces, and thus any UI built atop it is inherently fragile by design.
Heck, CSS didn't even have the concept of viewport-relative units until fairly recently, and Firefox just got support for them a few of months ago. And the calc() operation and box-sizing: border-box features have only gotten support fairly recently as well, without which the standard box model is broken almost beyond repair for UI purposes.
And don't get me started on the HTML editing parts of HTML5. I could rant for hours on all the bugs I've run into in that area.
IMO, doing HTML/CSS actually feels appreciably clumsier than my experience writing X11 code (Xlib-level), which is really saying something, because that's a pain in the ***.
Not really. I'm pretty sure there's a graveyard somewhere with the bones of all the companies who thought a browser would make a perfectly good OS and did not realize their mistake in time.
Odds are good that Chrome OS will fail to gain significant traction for exactly the same reason: HTML and CSS are really, really terrible for complicated user interfaces. Things that take fifteen seconds in Interface Builder can take hours or even days to do correctly with HTML/CSS, assuming you're designing to accommodate variably sized browser windows. And making what rightfully ought to be a tiny design change can force you to do a massive redesign of the CSS and HTML.
Speaking as somebody who has written some pretty complex web apps over the years, I've concluded that the state of web UIs is so horribly primitive compared with the state of native UIs in terms of the amount of effort required to get a usable result, and the documentation for the various toolkits is so mind-bogglingly poor compared with docs for pretty much any of the native UI systems, that I can't imagine anybody being crazy enough to think a web-based OS would succeed, particularly after Apple AND Palm/HP tried it and concluded that it wasn't practical.
This is, of course, the 9th circuit, where you'd pretty much expect this result from an en banc review (which for the 9th circuit probably means a limited en banc review by 11 judges, because I don't think all 29 judges have ever reviewed anything). The only way I could see them going the other way is if it were merely a three-judge panel with some of the most conservative judges on that court.
Simply put, because decay is the only thing that makes nontrivial copyright duration (beyond the time it takes to read or watch something once) meaningful.
With decay, there is a nonzero cost per consumer, because eventually the media fails and must be replaced. That cost, small as it might be, produces much of the content creator's profit margin for nearly the entire copyright term.
Take away the decay, and hundreds (or, at most, thousands) of copies of that creation can adequately service the needs of the entire world, because that's how many people are likely to be listening to the same song, reading the same book, or watching the same movie at any given moment. The world need only obtain additional copies up to that point, and once enough copies are obtained, those copies could be transferred instantly from a shared pool to whoever wanted to consume that work at that moment. This would effectively mean that no creative work would ever pay back the cost of its creation unless the creator charged hundreds or even thousands of dollars per copy, which is expensive enough that no one would buy them.
Chicago 14th ed., sections 5.29 and 5.33.
If you mean deadbeat after the fact (the guy moving out a few months later), then appropriate time limits should render that problem largely moot.
If you mean deadbeat to mean somebody who doesn't bother to use protection and then doesn't call, then I would argue that the blame falls equally on both parties for that decision, and that those situations aren't really different from any other case of unwanted pregnancy. Those folks are unlikely to pay child support anyway, so there's a very high probability that (no matter what the law or the courts say) the mother will end up taking full responsibility for that child's welfare. So it isn't so much letting these people off the hook as acknowledging the reality of the situation and encouraging the women in question to place those kids in a good home with a family who will be better able to take care of them. Those situations are particularly good candidates for open adoption, assuming they can find a willing family.
Emotionally, sure. I was solely talking about the risk to the health of the person involved (infertility, fatal infections, etc.), which for drug-induced abortions are, AFAIK, fairly similar to a miscarriage in terms of the harm to the mother. That said, I haven't studied the subject in depth, so I could be wrong. The emotional harm from abortions, for most people, is considerable, hence the reason that I would consider adoption to be almost invariably a better choice.
Up until the moment of birth, yes, but that's only 9 months out of the 18.75 years in which the parents are responsible for that child. For the other 18 years, both parents' roles are equal, and given that statistically, men make more money than women (even in the same jobs at the same companies), you could even argue that the father plays a greater role for the remaining 18 years. You can't just look at the first nine months in isolation, because the decision of whether to abort a child, give that child up for adoption, or keep that child continues to shape the lives of both parents for a lot longer than that.
From an ethical perspective, there's actually something to be said about giving the father the right to terminate child support if the father objected to the mother keeping the baby prior to its birth. Here's why: There's a small minority of women who, when a relationship is on the rocks, stop taking birth control pills in the hopes that having a baby will fix the relationship. If the father had a legally enshrined right to say, "Give the baby up for adoption or I won't be obligated to pay any child support," those sorts of pregnancies would be significantly rarer, and the abortions that often follow a few months later would also be significantly rarer.
Not really a fair comparison. One is a procedure that ends a single pregnancy, the other is a largely permanent procedure that ends the possibility of future pregnancies. For that matter, non-surgical abortions (RU-486) have been legal in the U.S. for more than a decade, so it's more on the same scale as forcing a man to take Viagra.
Not that I'm advocating abortion, mind you—personally, I think it should be avoided to the maximum extent possible—but if you're going to make an argument from a safety perspective, it ought to at least be a valid argument. For example, there's a much stronger case for allowing a woman to abort an child without the father's consent, given that there are very real safety risks associated with having a baby, and very real safety risks with telling some men (the abusive kind) that you're going to abort their baby.
The reason it wasn't reported on is that the unusualness of the circumstances in which it might be appropriate is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is Holder's unwillingness to define a position on the subject, and his unwillingness to define any sort of bounds on the situations in which such attacks would be appropriate.
The answer to whether drone strikes against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil are legal is almost always a very resounding "No", because of the Posse Comitatus Act, several of the amendments in the bill of rights, and probably half a dozen other reasons. The only situation in which it might even remotely be legal would be if we were in a state of war, Congress had suspended habeas corpus, and forces that included U.S. citizens were actively waging war against the United States. In other words, nothing short of a second U.S. Civil War would be grounds for such an action. And if he had stated it that way, I would have been okay with it, because those bounds would make it clear why such strikes are unlikely to ever occur.
But he didn't do that. He hedged. He refused to give an answer to what should have been a simple question, and in my experience, that is almost always a sign of deliberate deception—as though he won't answer it because he suspects that it will happen, and soon. In fact, were it not for my natural assumption that any such action would likely have been noticed and reported by someone, his reaction would have been enough to make me suspect that perhaps such a drone attack on U.S. soil had already happened, maybe as an inadvertent border patrol action.
This isn't going to go away. The U.S. needs clear policies on the use of drones within our borders, both for military use and for law enforcement use. And until that happens, people with fringe agendas like Rand Paul are going to continue getting far more air time than they rightfully deserve.
What I find most amusing is that they're allowing knives that are too small to be useful, but not allowing any real pocketknives. That Leatherman multi-tool that all you geeks carry around? The blade is almost certainly too long by about half an inch.
It is almost as though the TSA deliberately designed this program to eliminate any sort of knife that has any useful purpose beyond cutting through the clear tape on shipping boxes.
In almost every case it is acceptable to use a comma before "and". In the case of a series, it's a Harvard/Oxford/serial comma (and is either present or absent, depending on the editorial style of whoever you're writing for). In the case of a compound sentence, it is required. And in the case of a compound predicate (as in this sentence), it is considered optional. As a rule, you should not use a comma in a compound predicate unless the sentence is fairly complex. I probably would not have put in that comma, but I also probably would not have objected if someone else had put it in.
The only situation I can think of in which it is actually wrong (as opposed to being required or being a style issue) to use a comma before the word "and" is when you're writing a simple series of two things, e.g. "The boy, and girl went to the store."
Depends on whether they're down with OPP.
Allow me to point out some other things that are in the Constitution:
And so on. The fact of the matter is that you only have the rights that you are willing to defend. If we as a society are unwilling to vote the bums out for defiling the Constitution, then that becomes the new normal. Worse, because justices change over time, newer justices who see these abuses as normal will have less reason to question the next set of abuses. Over the generations, this results in an almost unstoppable march towards tyranny. The slippery slope is very real. It just takes several generations to be fully realized.
Of course, historically speaking, things always eventually get to a point where the masses revolt and form a new government designed to protect them from the abuses of the past, usually by ensuring that the worst usurpers are the first against the wall. However, just as inevitably, that new government eventually gets perverted over the decades or centuries until it looks a lot like what they had before. Rinse, repeat. And this pattern pretty much describes all governments throughout history.
Sadly, there is one truth, and that is this: that which you are unwilling to defend will be taken away from you. If you value freedom, you must be willing to act against those who would take it away—casting your vote, running for office, and so on. If you do not do that, then you have no rights, and no piece of paper is ever going to change that.
I think you missed my point. There's no law that says the mirror must have only a single pivot point. You could make a mirror that pivots in the middle, for example, and mount a second sensor down near the bottom of the camera. So in normal mode, the mirror flips up and exposes the sensor, and in low-light mode, the mirror flips 90 degrees and reflects the light down instead of up. Because a 45 degree mirror preserves the distance from each pixel to the lens, the only thing you'd have to do is vertically flip the resulting image, which is trivial to do in software.
Of course, it would be beneficial for the mirror in such a design to be double-sided so that the face that becomes part of the optical path for the second sensor would be moderately protected from scratches and dust. You would probably also want some sort of flip-down or slide-in black cover over the second sensor so that it would not produce reflections of off-axis light on the main sensor (which could remain continuously in the covered position until the second sensor is needed). None of those design constraints seems particularly insurmountable (or even all that difficult) mechanically, though, unless there's something subtle that I'm missing.
As for having multiple bodies, I do, but since I'm not shooting professionally, I usually leave my spare back in the hotel room. If my main camera body fails, I can always fall back on my iPhone. Sure, that's less than ideal, but it just isn't worth carrying around that much extra bulk. My lenses are heavy enough to be obnoxious by themselves without adding an extra 1.25 pounds for a spare body.
Computer: I see you hate your job and hate your boss with a borderline psychopathic myopia, and you think that all the people around you are idiots who don't deserve to breathe your air. You have been added to the handgun watch list out of an abundance of caution.
There's no limit to how much money you can take away from them if you buy the product and can convince the jury that you were irreparably harmed by it. :-D
Alternatively, there's no limit to how much damage you can do if you encourage people to post negative reviews on Amazon. Most sane people will think twice before buying a product whose reviews look like this:
Unless EA starts astroturfing to bring the ratings up, I suspect this game is pretty much doomed to be a total bust, at least as far as sales on Amazon are concerned. You don't just "get over" that strong a negative reaction to your product.
And if enough folks posted such consistently harsh reviews at every game review site, every store site, etc., then companies like EA would have exactly two choices at their disposal: correct their craniorectal inversion or go out of business. That's the nice thing about online shopping: by putting lots of information about the product at your fingertips, it forces companies to compete on quality instead of just competing on price.
Because other aspects of CCD technology have improved significantly since then, like the advent of back-illuminated CCDs. Given that they are designed for astronomy purposes, I suspect these CCDs are back-illuminated, which results in significantly lower noise. They might also be Peltier-cooled, which further reduces the thermal noise component of that noise floor. And even if these chips are neither of those things, I'd expect the noise floor to still be much lower than an older DSLR because of other advances.
What I'd like to see is a DSLR in which the mirror can flip in a different direction to expose one of these sensors under ultra-low-light conditions. That way you could choose, at the time you are taking the shot, whether to prioritize resolution or light gathering.
So Schrödinger's cat saved your life? I find that unlikely. Unless, of course, an atom decayed.
Speaking of which, if an atom decays in the woods and no one is around to detect it, is the cat still dead?
Maybe they took the time to actually present real evidence of harm this time. :-)
In my quick skim of the subject, it didn't look like the courts held much of anything beyond that the people bringing the case failed to provide enough evidence for it to actually go to trial.
That is to say that they did not hold that those things did not injure competition, but rather that those things did not inherently injure competition, and that without further evidence to support the claim of injury, the prosecution presented insufficient grounds for the suit to proceed.
Did I miss a subsequent, more solid decision on the subject?