The sound of the fundamental frequency of human speech occupies a fairly narrow band between 100 and 220 Hz. Move it up far enough to take advantage of that curve in any significant way, and you're into Alvin and the Chipmunks territory and then some. I just don't see that happening.
State governments are far more corrupt than the federal government.
The difference is that you can run for state office without a multi-million-dollar budget, so when corruption happens, it's much easier to get a wide selection of qualified and competent candidates to replace them.
Also, many states have a referendum process to make grassroots changes to their government. As a result of this, election laws are easily changed to fix the two-party problems that occur at the federal level. There's no good way to fix it at the federal level because the people who would have to vote to change it are the ones who benefit most from it. That alone is reason to suspect that having a much, much smaller and weaker federal government would be a significant win.
I'm not saying it's a panacea, and I'm not convinced that dismantling the entitlement portions of the federal government would be beneficial—it would probably be more expensive if each state were redundantly doing the same job—but dismantling the legislative part of the federal government would probably get us a lot closer to being in control of our own destiny as a nation once again.... Either that or we could try to convince all the state governments to call for a constitutional convention to fix things. Could happen, but not too likely.
no it's a hole in the auth, since they used a known weak method that relies on the security of the telco over which they have no control
No, worse than that, it's not true two-factor security. It's one-factor. In order to be two-factor security, you must have two items, e.g. things you have or things you know, that are separate and distinct and cannot be derived from one another. Lots of folks use their smartphones for mobile banking. Someone cracking your smartphone can potentially access not only your mobile banking credentials but also your email, text messages, etc. Therefore, these cannot be considered two separate and unrelated factors any more than a cryptocard simulator running on your PC is a second factor.
The fact that this attack happened via social engineering is actually fairly unimportant. Even if the social engineering attacks were not possible, a cellular phone would still not be a valid second factor for authentication because people can store credentials on them. When are companies going to learn that two-factor authentication requires a separate hardware device that does not have access to your login credentials and vice-versa?
We have a very different notion of the word decentralized. A decentralized system is one in which the traffic for a given endpoint has no single point of failure other than the endpoint. The user's computer is an endpoint. The UCB mail server is not an endpoint; it is a node in the connection graph. Therefore, email is not decentralized. As soon as any organization has a central server, it is not decentralized.
The problem is that email is designed around trusted hosts instead of trusted users, and at this point, those trusted hosts have gotten way too large. Worse, they aren't all trusted anymore. What we really need is something more akin to a P2P email infrastructure, in which each user is responsible for storing his or her own email, and in which each user must use a valid public-private key pair to sign each message (or encrypt, if desired).
Such a design would not only eliminate these single points of failure, but also make spam much, much harder because it could always be traced back to either the original sender or to a specific user whose compromised computer relayed the message. Either way, cutting off a source of spam becomes trivially automatable at that point.
I'm not talking about dead subpixels that are unknown. Most cameras have a mechanism for mapping out pixels that were defective at the factory. Those pixels are removed by the camera ahead of time, and at least in their JPEG rendering, are always mapped out in exactly the same way using some camera-defined interpolation scheme. Thus, for each mapped-out subpixel, the value of one color channel of the corresponding pixel should be predictable based on its neighbors. If that pixel's red or blue or green channel value is anything other than what the camera should have produced, the image is a forgery (or at minimum, it has been recompressed at a low quality setting).
As for chromatic aberration, what kind of photos do you take that have no sharp edges?:-D But seriously, you're right that the presence of enough areas of sharp contrast is not guaranteed.
Creating a Photoshop job that will fool even a sophisticated human eye is easy. Creating one that will fool an algorithm is very, very hard. The modification detection algorithms I remember hearing about start by taking a series of test images with the specific camera that was used to take the picture. In order to beat them, among other things, you'd need to:
...mathematically compute the probability of noise for each subpixel and adjust your noise so that the distance of each pixel from the mean of nearby pixels in areas of low contrast is close enough to what would be expected for that particular spot on that particular CCD at a particular physical temperature, and so that the noise level is consistent with the expected noise for a single physical temperature value across the entire image.
Alternatively, if a particular camera gets hot spots on parts of the chip when shooting lots of pictures in a row, the noise level might need to be a very complex gradient with the hot spots in particular places on the chip.
...know where every dead subpixel is on that camera so that you can mathematically compute the correct color channel value for each dead subpixel based on its neighbors in the same way that the camera does.
...read the EXIF data to determine which pixels the camera mapped out because of dust, if that particular camera does that, and compute their values programmatically in a similar fashion.
...precisely reproduce the chromatic aberrations of the lens at every point in the image.
...precisely reproduce the subtle variations in tint at every high contrast edge caused by the relative positions of the subpixels at that particular point on the CCD.
And so on. It's not a case of artistic training. It's a case of spending months modeling a single camera in MatLab. Not a single model. A single camera.
The best part of that is their suggested replacement for "Photoshopped", which is "enhanced with Adobe® Photoshop® Elements software." This has several problems:
It contains two registered trademark symbols in the sentence. In addition to making the sentence harder to read, these symbols are only required (legally) if you work for Adobe or are otherwise using the term as part of selling their product or a competing product. It does not dilute Adobe's mark if the term is used in reference to their product, with or without that symbol.
If you are going to insert those ® marks, then Elements should have a (TM) mark beside it (which curiously, Slashcode does not allow even though it allows ®).
Such images are rarely actually enhanced by the process. The term "Photoshopped" usually refers to constructing a new image that adds somebody into a picture where they didn't actually appear, makes it look like a bus is falling off a cliff, pastes one person's head on another person's body, etc.
History has shown that because of the Streisand Effect, guidelines like this are more likely to increase misuse of the mark rather than diminish it.
Verbing a trademark only significantly dilutes the mark if people start using the word Photoshopped to also mean GIMPed, Pixelmatored, or MS Painted. Since the Streisand Effect applies here anyway, the company would be better off registering a trademark with the verb form, then begin marketing the word Photoshopped as "edited with Photoshop" in the most clear and unambiguous way possible.
Not likely. When you airbrush, you're destroying the original data. That's why you can detect the change; it no longer has the same fringing around areas of contrast, the noise levels don't quite match, the gradients don't look exactly the same, the reflections of lighting are subtly off, etc. There's nothing to restore because the original information is gone. The best you could do is highlight the areas that were altered. Maybe, if you were lucky, you might be able to approximately reverse a virtual tummy tuck by showing where the moved portions probably were originally, then leaving a gap where content was elided, but that's kind of the exception rather than the rule.
What would be more entertaining would be if someone took this algorithm, then rewrote it (or wrote a parallel successive approximation algorithm to feed into it) so that it generates photos that, although heavily doctored, pass this test. Put another way, this sort of methodology is only effective if the details are kept secret....
The only way cancer risk could not increase with dehydration would be if the loss of white blood cells (resulting not only in less effective attacks on cancer cells, but also less effective attacks on viruses that cause many forms of cancer) were somehow balanced by some other anti-cancer benefit of being dehydrated.
In effect, that chain of logic being wrong would mean that poor overall health reduces the risk of cancer. That's a pretty big stretch. I suppose it's theoretically possible, but I'd bet on the Cubs to win the World Series before I'd take that bet.:-)
True. If memory serves, you need fewer hours the older you get, with young kids needing way more than eight hours, and adults needing an average of eight. That said, since most game developers who would work in this sort of sweatshop are probably straight out of college and don't know any better, eight is probably actually on the low side. Sure, they're used to pulling "all-nighters", and they try to act as if they're functional, but in reality, they're a lot more impaired than they let on.:-)
Also, IIRC, there were studies that show that people who claim to be "fine" on five or six hours of sleep are frequently mistaken (not that they aren't functional at that level, but that they are significantly impaired compared with their performance when they get more sleep). I can't remember the details, but eight hours, plus or minus about one, seems to be the sweet spot for most adults.
Actually, you're completely wrong. Not drinking enough water does increase the risk of cancer. It's a fairly well understood biological process, in fact, or at least each of the individual links in the chain is well understood, and linking them together into a statement of causation requires only basic inductive reasoning.... The proof looks something like this:
Dehydration causes your body to produce cortisol, a stress-induced steroidal hormone.
Cortisol suppresses your body's production of white blood cells.
White blood cells naturally attack cancer cells (some types of cancer cells under some circumstances anyway), killing many cells before they have a chance to take hold and form a tumor.
Therefore insufficient water intake increases your risk of cancer.
Q.E.D.
Now I'm not saying that drinking 8 cups of water per day guarantees that you won't get cancer. Far from it. However, failing to drink enough water does increase your risk of cancer, and drinking 8 cups of water per day is generally considered to be enough to avoid stressing your body unnecessarily (and thus enough to avoid increasing your cancer risk).
Also note that the amount of water that people need varies according to your build, your level of exercise, the temperature of your environment, etc. The whole eight cups thing is just a first approximation, not a hard and fast rule. What matters is not the amount, but rather whether the amount you drink is enough to avoid chronic dehydration.
Frankly, the thought of going to a doctor who works an 80 hour week scares the hell out of me. You can't possibly do your best work under those conditions. The problem is not that folks at computer game manufacturers are forced to work ridiculous hours. The problem is that there are any employees in the U.S. who because of their "exempt" status are allowed to work such unhealthy hours.
I'm okay with having an exemption to the forty hour cap for highly skilled workers, but there should be a 60 hour cap that applies for everyone, and a maximum of 50 hours average over the course of a year, above which the employers should start having to give comp days at a rate of one day per eight hours of additional work over the limit. Period.
The most I've ever worked was only about 80 hours, and I've only done that once or twice, and only for a week to get past a major crunch. If memory serves, I ended up taking a sick day afterwards in both cases. Even knowing that the end was in sight, with a clear goal, I was physically exhausted and ended up getting ill as a result. The human body just was not built to work 80 and 100 hour weeks.
Your body needs eight hours of sleep, plus time to travel back and forth to work, bathe, get settled down for bed, eat breakfast, etc. This means that you cannot realistically budget fewer than ten hours per day away from work. If you try, you'll likely cause serious and, in some cases, permanent damage to your employees' health. This only leaves 14 hours per day, or 98 hours per week as an absolute maximum that the human body can realistically endure over an extended period of time, even if you have no outside activities at all besides work—no family, no church, no hobbies. And psychologically, all work and no play isn't healthy even in the short term.
In general, above about 50 hours per week, productivity is flat, and it starts to taper off way before that. You can do more than that for very, very brief periods—a week, maybe two if you use enough caffeine and are really, really excited about what you're doing—but it simply is not sustainable in the long term, and this has been proven by countless studies. In short, anybody who works their employees for 80 hour weeks is a complete f**king idiot who should not be allowed to manage the animals in a local zoo, much less the employees in a major corporation.
Or, put another way, except for most terrorists. After all, if they had even a modicum of guilt, they wouldn't commit such atrocities. Therefore, without even looking at this technology, we can fairly definitively state that it cannot possibly be effective at preventing terrorist attacks of any sort.
That won't stop the TSA from spending billions of dollars to buy them and install them in airports across the country, though, and this is why our government is going broke. Want to shave of 8.1 billion dollars of ugly pork barrel spending? Dismantle the TSA.
BRD as a data storage medium is DOA. Nobody exchanges physical media anymore except when selling products, and even if they did, ten dollar flash sticks are a lot more robust, more reusable, and much, much faster.
The only significant remaining reason to consider optical media is for backups, but that requires reasonable parity between the capacity of the optical media and the capacity of the drives they're backing up. Most people can't afford to sit at home for several days to swap new discs into a burner. When you exceed about ten discs per drive, there's just no hope of it ever catching on. After the next hard drive capacity increase, it will be a hundred Blu-Ray discs per drive.
BRD started becoming borderline infeasible as a backup medium when hard drives hit 250 GB. In other words, Blu-Ray was dead as a data medium three or four years before the first Blu-Ray burner hit the market. They dragged their heels for so many years that by the time the first drives hit the market, they already had too small a capacity to be useful. If they had released a shipping product when they announced the standard back in 2000, it would have been perfect. If the first prototypes in 2003 had been consumer burners, it would have been only moderately interesting as a backup medium. By the time the first consumer burner was actually released in 2006, the only people who still cared were pirates and small independent filmmakers. Drives were at 750 GB, and BRD-ROM discs were still single-layer at 25 GB, for a whopping 30 discs per drive.
Stick a fork in it. Blu-Ray is done, at least as far as being anything other than a movie distribution medium is concerned. At this point, the price break on Blu-Ray discs is almost ten years too late, and counting.
For most people who don't play games and don't store big video files, current sub-$100 SSDs are good enough; 40-60GB will store the OS and office apps and some documents and pictures. For most people who don't fit in that category, 1TB is not enough.
Given that the OS uses that 40-60 GB as paging space, sixty gigs will just about handle a serious Photoshop user with no other apps installed, no photos, no music, and no documents.:-D
I would argue that this doesn't qualify. From the reports I've read, they built their HD manufacturing plants in a known floodplain protected by levees. It could trivially have been prevented with a modicum of foresight by not building the plant in a floodplain....
That's not the way I would interpret the original poster's question. It sounds to me like the original poster wants to get significantly better quality photos without necessarily learning how to use a camera in manual mode.
That doesn't mean the original poster doesn't want to shoot RAW. If anything, shooting in full auto makes it a lot more important to always use RAW, as the fully automatic modes on cameras tend to get color balance and aperture wrong more often than they get it right. RAW can often make the difference between usable and unsalvageable.
Manual zooms also give you much, much better battery life. The only reason to ever use a powered zoom is if you're shooting video. For still shooting, it's horribly inefficient in every way.
BTW, "superzoom" cameras generally have a decided disadvantage in terms of picture quality at one or both ends of their range. That's why most DSLR owners buy lenses with smaller zoom ranges most of the time, even though larger ranges are available.
Entry-level SLRs seem to be really a class above point-and-shoots, especially that you regain control of the focus adjustment and aperture. This really is a make-or-break when taking multiple pictures of the same subject, like you often do (bits are cheap!).
Not to mention that most non-SLR digital cameras won't do RAW output except with hacked firmware. It's amazing how much more damage you can correct after the fact (color balance errors in particular) if you shoot exclusively in RAW.
Also, DSLRs have a decided advantage in photographic quality because of their lens size. The amount of light gathered and the maximum effective resolution are both proportional to the diameter of the objective (front) lens. (I realize that this is glossing over a lot of details, but it's a good first approximation.)
Slashdot Mirror
The sound of the fundamental frequency of human speech occupies a fairly narrow band between 100 and 220 Hz. Move it up far enough to take advantage of that curve in any significant way, and you're into Alvin and the Chipmunks territory and then some. I just don't see that happening.
Actually, Mac OS X does. Check out NSCache and NSPurgeableMemory. I'm not sure if Firefox uses it, mind you.
I think you're looking for this one: http://xkcd.com/451/
Then they can combine, using the crust for raw materials, and form a giant city with human-form repli... no, wait....
The difference is that you can run for state office without a multi-million-dollar budget, so when corruption happens, it's much easier to get a wide selection of qualified and competent candidates to replace them.
Also, many states have a referendum process to make grassroots changes to their government. As a result of this, election laws are easily changed to fix the two-party problems that occur at the federal level. There's no good way to fix it at the federal level because the people who would have to vote to change it are the ones who benefit most from it. That alone is reason to suspect that having a much, much smaller and weaker federal government would be a significant win.
I'm not saying it's a panacea, and I'm not convinced that dismantling the entitlement portions of the federal government would be beneficial—it would probably be more expensive if each state were redundantly doing the same job—but dismantling the legislative part of the federal government would probably get us a lot closer to being in control of our own destiny as a nation once again.... Either that or we could try to convince all the state governments to call for a constitutional convention to fix things. Could happen, but not too likely.
No, worse than that, it's not true two-factor security. It's one-factor. In order to be two-factor security, you must have two items, e.g. things you have or things you know, that are separate and distinct and cannot be derived from one another. Lots of folks use their smartphones for mobile banking. Someone cracking your smartphone can potentially access not only your mobile banking credentials but also your email, text messages, etc. Therefore, these cannot be considered two separate and unrelated factors any more than a cryptocard simulator running on your PC is a second factor.
The fact that this attack happened via social engineering is actually fairly unimportant. Even if the social engineering attacks were not possible, a cellular phone would still not be a valid second factor for authentication because people can store credentials on them. When are companies going to learn that two-factor authentication requires a separate hardware device that does not have access to your login credentials and vice-versa?
One word. Trebuchet.
We have a very different notion of the word decentralized. A decentralized system is one in which the traffic for a given endpoint has no single point of failure other than the endpoint. The user's computer is an endpoint. The UCB mail server is not an endpoint; it is a node in the connection graph. Therefore, email is not decentralized. As soon as any organization has a central server, it is not decentralized.
The problem is that email is designed around trusted hosts instead of trusted users, and at this point, those trusted hosts have gotten way too large. Worse, they aren't all trusted anymore. What we really need is something more akin to a P2P email infrastructure, in which each user is responsible for storing his or her own email, and in which each user must use a valid public-private key pair to sign each message (or encrypt, if desired).
Such a design would not only eliminate these single points of failure, but also make spam much, much harder because it could always be traced back to either the original sender or to a specific user whose compromised computer relayed the message. Either way, cutting off a source of spam becomes trivially automatable at that point.
I'm not talking about dead subpixels that are unknown. Most cameras have a mechanism for mapping out pixels that were defective at the factory. Those pixels are removed by the camera ahead of time, and at least in their JPEG rendering, are always mapped out in exactly the same way using some camera-defined interpolation scheme. Thus, for each mapped-out subpixel, the value of one color channel of the corresponding pixel should be predictable based on its neighbors. If that pixel's red or blue or green channel value is anything other than what the camera should have produced, the image is a forgery (or at minimum, it has been recompressed at a low quality setting).
As for chromatic aberration, what kind of photos do you take that have no sharp edges? :-D But seriously, you're right that the presence of enough areas of sharp contrast is not guaranteed.
Creating a Photoshop job that will fool even a sophisticated human eye is easy. Creating one that will fool an algorithm is very, very hard. The modification detection algorithms I remember hearing about start by taking a series of test images with the specific camera that was used to take the picture. In order to beat them, among other things, you'd need to:
...mathematically compute the probability of noise for each subpixel and adjust your noise so that the distance of each pixel from the mean of nearby pixels in areas of low contrast is close enough to what would be expected for that particular spot on that particular CCD at a particular physical temperature, and so that the noise level is consistent with the expected noise for a single physical temperature value across the entire image.
Alternatively, if a particular camera gets hot spots on parts of the chip when shooting lots of pictures in a row, the noise level might need to be a very complex gradient with the hot spots in particular places on the chip.
And so on. It's not a case of artistic training. It's a case of spending months modeling a single camera in MatLab. Not a single model. A single camera.
The best part of that is their suggested replacement for "Photoshopped", which is "enhanced with Adobe® Photoshop® Elements software." This has several problems:
As always, caveat emptor. IANALBIPOOSD.
Not likely. When you airbrush, you're destroying the original data. That's why you can detect the change; it no longer has the same fringing around areas of contrast, the noise levels don't quite match, the gradients don't look exactly the same, the reflections of lighting are subtly off, etc. There's nothing to restore because the original information is gone. The best you could do is highlight the areas that were altered. Maybe, if you were lucky, you might be able to approximately reverse a virtual tummy tuck by showing where the moved portions probably were originally, then leaving a gap where content was elided, but that's kind of the exception rather than the rule.
What would be more entertaining would be if someone took this algorithm, then rewrote it (or wrote a parallel successive approximation algorithm to feed into it) so that it generates photos that, although heavily doctored, pass this test. Put another way, this sort of methodology is only effective if the details are kept secret....
The only way cancer risk could not increase with dehydration would be if the loss of white blood cells (resulting not only in less effective attacks on cancer cells, but also less effective attacks on viruses that cause many forms of cancer) were somehow balanced by some other anti-cancer benefit of being dehydrated.
In effect, that chain of logic being wrong would mean that poor overall health reduces the risk of cancer. That's a pretty big stretch. I suppose it's theoretically possible, but I'd bet on the Cubs to win the World Series before I'd take that bet. :-)
True. If memory serves, you need fewer hours the older you get, with young kids needing way more than eight hours, and adults needing an average of eight. That said, since most game developers who would work in this sort of sweatshop are probably straight out of college and don't know any better, eight is probably actually on the low side. Sure, they're used to pulling "all-nighters", and they try to act as if they're functional, but in reality, they're a lot more impaired than they let on. :-)
Also, IIRC, there were studies that show that people who claim to be "fine" on five or six hours of sleep are frequently mistaken (not that they aren't functional at that level, but that they are significantly impaired compared with their performance when they get more sleep). I can't remember the details, but eight hours, plus or minus about one, seems to be the sweet spot for most adults.
Actually, you're completely wrong. Not drinking enough water does increase the risk of cancer. It's a fairly well understood biological process, in fact, or at least each of the individual links in the chain is well understood, and linking them together into a statement of causation requires only basic inductive reasoning.... The proof looks something like this:
Q.E.D.
Now I'm not saying that drinking 8 cups of water per day guarantees that you won't get cancer. Far from it. However, failing to drink enough water does increase your risk of cancer, and drinking 8 cups of water per day is generally considered to be enough to avoid stressing your body unnecessarily (and thus enough to avoid increasing your cancer risk).
Also note that the amount of water that people need varies according to your build, your level of exercise, the temperature of your environment, etc. The whole eight cups thing is just a first approximation, not a hard and fast rule. What matters is not the amount, but rather whether the amount you drink is enough to avoid chronic dehydration.
Frankly, the thought of going to a doctor who works an 80 hour week scares the hell out of me. You can't possibly do your best work under those conditions. The problem is not that folks at computer game manufacturers are forced to work ridiculous hours. The problem is that there are any employees in the U.S. who because of their "exempt" status are allowed to work such unhealthy hours.
I'm okay with having an exemption to the forty hour cap for highly skilled workers, but there should be a 60 hour cap that applies for everyone, and a maximum of 50 hours average over the course of a year, above which the employers should start having to give comp days at a rate of one day per eight hours of additional work over the limit. Period.
The most I've ever worked was only about 80 hours, and I've only done that once or twice, and only for a week to get past a major crunch. If memory serves, I ended up taking a sick day afterwards in both cases. Even knowing that the end was in sight, with a clear goal, I was physically exhausted and ended up getting ill as a result. The human body just was not built to work 80 and 100 hour weeks.
Your body needs eight hours of sleep, plus time to travel back and forth to work, bathe, get settled down for bed, eat breakfast, etc. This means that you cannot realistically budget fewer than ten hours per day away from work. If you try, you'll likely cause serious and, in some cases, permanent damage to your employees' health. This only leaves 14 hours per day, or 98 hours per week as an absolute maximum that the human body can realistically endure over an extended period of time, even if you have no outside activities at all besides work—no family, no church, no hobbies. And psychologically, all work and no play isn't healthy even in the short term.
In general, above about 50 hours per week, productivity is flat, and it starts to taper off way before that. You can do more than that for very, very brief periods—a week, maybe two if you use enough caffeine and are really, really excited about what you're doing—but it simply is not sustainable in the long term, and this has been proven by countless studies. In short, anybody who works their employees for 80 hour weeks is a complete f**king idiot who should not be allowed to manage the animals in a local zoo, much less the employees in a major corporation.
Or, put another way, except for most terrorists. After all, if they had even a modicum of guilt, they wouldn't commit such atrocities. Therefore, without even looking at this technology, we can fairly definitively state that it cannot possibly be effective at preventing terrorist attacks of any sort.
That won't stop the TSA from spending billions of dollars to buy them and install them in airports across the country, though, and this is why our government is going broke. Want to shave of 8.1 billion dollars of ugly pork barrel spending? Dismantle the TSA.
Err... I meant BD-R, not ROM.
BRD as a data storage medium is DOA. Nobody exchanges physical media anymore except when selling products, and even if they did, ten dollar flash sticks are a lot more robust, more reusable, and much, much faster.
The only significant remaining reason to consider optical media is for backups, but that requires reasonable parity between the capacity of the optical media and the capacity of the drives they're backing up. Most people can't afford to sit at home for several days to swap new discs into a burner. When you exceed about ten discs per drive, there's just no hope of it ever catching on. After the next hard drive capacity increase, it will be a hundred Blu-Ray discs per drive.
BRD started becoming borderline infeasible as a backup medium when hard drives hit 250 GB. In other words, Blu-Ray was dead as a data medium three or four years before the first Blu-Ray burner hit the market. They dragged their heels for so many years that by the time the first drives hit the market, they already had too small a capacity to be useful. If they had released a shipping product when they announced the standard back in 2000, it would have been perfect. If the first prototypes in 2003 had been consumer burners, it would have been only moderately interesting as a backup medium. By the time the first consumer burner was actually released in 2006, the only people who still cared were pirates and small independent filmmakers. Drives were at 750 GB, and BRD-ROM discs were still single-layer at 25 GB, for a whopping 30 discs per drive.
Stick a fork in it. Blu-Ray is done, at least as far as being anything other than a movie distribution medium is concerned. At this point, the price break on Blu-Ray discs is almost ten years too late, and counting.
Given that the OS uses that 40-60 GB as paging space, sixty gigs will just about handle a serious Photoshop user with no other apps installed, no photos, no music, and no documents. :-D
I would argue that this doesn't qualify. From the reports I've read, they built their HD manufacturing plants in a known floodplain protected by levees. It could trivially have been prevented with a modicum of foresight by not building the plant in a floodplain....
That's not the way I would interpret the original poster's question. It sounds to me like the original poster wants to get significantly better quality photos without necessarily learning how to use a camera in manual mode.
That doesn't mean the original poster doesn't want to shoot RAW. If anything, shooting in full auto makes it a lot more important to always use RAW, as the fully automatic modes on cameras tend to get color balance and aperture wrong more often than they get it right. RAW can often make the difference between usable and unsalvageable.
Manual zooms also give you much, much better battery life. The only reason to ever use a powered zoom is if you're shooting video. For still shooting, it's horribly inefficient in every way.
BTW, "superzoom" cameras generally have a decided disadvantage in terms of picture quality at one or both ends of their range. That's why most DSLR owners buy lenses with smaller zoom ranges most of the time, even though larger ranges are available.
Not to mention that most non-SLR digital cameras won't do RAW output except with hacked firmware. It's amazing how much more damage you can correct after the fact (color balance errors in particular) if you shoot exclusively in RAW.
Also, DSLRs have a decided advantage in photographic quality because of their lens size. The amount of light gathered and the maximum effective resolution are both proportional to the diameter of the objective (front) lens. (I realize that this is glossing over a lot of details, but it's a good first approximation.)