>What exactly are the health care costs of carbon dioxide?
Hard to calculate since it's an externality, and hard to prove. The kid in Cape Town who gets asthma could be getting it due to pollution in China ! But you can probably take at least the vast majority of respiratory illnesses.
>and plenty of contributors that do not have health consequences (like CO2). This statement is false. CO2 is toxic at fairly low levels actually.
>So, I'd really like to see that bill that you say is going to tax solar generators, as it'll affect me. I'm not aware of it though - the only measures I've heard were about the government trying to renege on it's 60c rate guarantee because the people not on solar were pissed off at subsidising people who are on solar.
I read about it on theregister.co.uk - look it up yourself. Either way - the subsidies you're claiming is "overgenerous" is far less than the subsidies on fossil fuels already. I'd be quite happy to say "let the market sort it out" but then it must be JUST the market, no subsidies for ANY energy at all AND externalized costs (which includes AGW) internalized by making all air-pollution outright illegal.
> I truly hope that someday "what they want" is never your daughters (if any) and/or wife. What then?
I can't say that will NEVER happen, but I do know that stranger-rape is by far the least common type of rape and accounts for a minuscule amount of over-all crime. The odd of that ever happening are a billion to one. If my daughters or wife are ever in that position - it will almost certainly be somebody they know - and he will almost certainly be unarmed. If I were to discover that, you bet your ass I would fight. But if I only find out later, you can also bet your ass I will not rest till he has been prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Frankly - I am more worried about my son being seduced by a female teacher (which is a much more common form of rape) and then dealing with the difficulties of getting female rapists prosecuted. The odds of THAT happening is MUCH higher.
Now of course, my system is... not perfect, you cannot EVER be prepared for EVERY scenario - but you can try to rationally (instead of emotionally) analyze risks (using mathematics not emotive arguments like 'duty') - and make the safest over-all choices. Rationally analyzed, the highest degree of safety I can give my family is definitely to NOT have any ranged projectile weapons in my house. Because this is a FACT and not an opinion - that is true for virtually EVERY person's house.
I don't favour gun bans - but I do favour strict gun control, including a license that requires a competency test which has to be RETAKEN no more than every 3 years. That alone will make a big difference for those who really ARE exceptions to the rule. It's been argued that "once you implement such controls, it's easy enough to abuse them" - I don't agree - there is a VERY easy way to prevent that. Simply make it compulsary for law enforcement officers to comply with EVERY gun law that any citizen has to comply with. They will NEVER disarm THEMSELVES.
The fact that in America cops have to recertified for weapons usage regularly but untrained civilians do not is a situation that I can only describe as: batshit crazy.
Okay... so in short - you didn't even read the fucking summary ?!?!?
This is NOT about "how they track vehicles". The Judge said "you cannot track vehicles without a warrant" - as a result, the FBI has been falling back on OTHER ways to track people without a warrant. This was a request to reveal what tracking methods they use WITHOUT a warrant.
> Today, America's enemies aren't nations - they're more often underground organizations of people (including American citizens) who disregard American laws.
And these people, citizens or not, still have rights. If you can't enforce the law without violating those rights - then you need to change the law. The are not a country at war with you and cannot be treated like enemy combatants.
But if you meant "terrists" instead of "criminals" then your case is even WEAKER. You have about a 95% higher risk of dying from SUICIDE than from a terrorist attack. You, personally, is a MUCH higher threat to your safety. So in this case you are sacrificing essential liberty for NON-EXISTENT temporary safety, to paraphrase Ben Franklin.
tl;dr - There is no freedom more essential than the right to KNOW the laws you live under.
And if nobody ever eats seafood again, that's a small price to pay. I mean the great white has survived the K2 event and that wiped out the dinosaurs so I'm SURE it will survive your algae blanket !
>Do you also believe that the gas companies send agents around the world to assassinate researchers every time they get close to discovering "free energy" or carburetors that will make any car in the world get 100 mpg?
I'm going to guess its something like: "If we reveal our policies, then criminals will know our policies and figure out ways around them or loopholes to avoid them".
Complete bullshit, but the kind of thinking that people in the system readily embrace.
>Looking at the measures countries are taking with AGW, it looks like the "better world" will consist of one where power producers are taxed more, and household power bills increase. Um, yay?
Firstly - that's bullshit, the money saved on healthcare costs alone will be far larger than what is spent on additional energy costs even if you were right. To get the TRUE price of fossil fuels we would have to demand they run with zero-pollution, only then are we internalizing the costs that pollution is exerting on the consumer. Do you really think coal power plants would still cost so little if they had to filter every pollutant out and store it safely instead of pumping it into the air and making us pay for the results ? But even though it would cost a fortune more to have clean coal, it would STILL cost LESS than we ALREADY spend on healthcare caused by pollution.
And then your basic assumptions is false anyway:
*More green energy would cost LESS to produce in the medium because fuel is not having to be paid for - in fact, many of them are cheaper even in the short term. *In Australia there is already measure being proposed to tax people who generate some of their power off-grid from solar. The massive reductions in their power bills from doing so is causing a major price depression on the power plants. So much so that the crony-capitalism of the power generators are trying to demand people can only get HALF the power they generate themselves off their bill !
So who is trying to prevent normal market operations now ? The REAL truth is that investment in green energy even on the SMALL scale of "my house during daylight hours while using grid at night" is already adding competition that drives down prices for consumers. More green energy on the large scale will only increase this.
No my friend - fossil energy companies are battling AGW measures because that is their excuse to prevent anybody from investing in renewable energy. They don't want people investing in renewable energy because they don't want the competition. Competition drives down prices - which is good for consumers, but bad for incumbents. The entire anti-AGW campaign is nothing but classic monopolist behaviour by an incumbent industry trying all in their power to prevent the rise of competing products that can and will consistently undercut it and will only be able to undercut it FURTHER over time as initial investments are paid off and production is scaled up.
So your ENTIRE resistance is an ad hominem attack ? "There are scam artists cashing in on AGW - therefore I refuse to listen to the concerned scientists or give credence to the theory".
There are scam artists in everything. There were scam artists in the Y2K days - but that doesn't mean the crisis wasn't real. Some of the money spent averting that crisis went to scam artists, but if we hadn't spent ANY money we would NOT have averted the crisis and it would have been disastrous. Now you're saying that because some scam artists exists in the energy world, we should not spend any money on solving the identified problem.
>You are making a huge pile of assumptions here while also completely ignoring my point. A gun ban will disarm only the law abiding. Period. That isn't a matter for debate unless you have some evidence that says criminals will perform the highly illogical act of rushing to turn in their weapons.
I make no such assumption. Sure the criminals will have guns - but if the citizenry is NOT armed - they will hardly ever USE them.
>Reading your entire comment and considering that you won't even keep a bloody bow in your house seems to indicate to me that you've got giant projection issues
You're an idiot then. I have no fear that I'll lash out with my bow, but I know that accidents happen. I would prefer my children have ZERO risk of finding it, playing with it and perhaps injuring themselves. Now considering that even if they did - the risk of injuring yourself with a bow is MUCH lower than a gun - imagine how I feel about guns.
>You also make the, in my opinion, irrational decision of living in what you call the country with the highest violent crime rate as a defenseless sheep. I've been a victim of crime twice - and BECAUSE I was unarmed, I remain alive. Because I did NOT have a gun, they didn't kill me to steal it. Because I didn't have a gun, they were content to wave theirs in my face without pulling the trigger. My country also has a per capita legal gun-ownership rate JUST lower than the USA's - and guess what, it has done NOTHING to reduce the crime rate.
I guess in your case that will mean calling the police and praying to God they get their in time to do more than just fill out the paperwork No, in my case it means keeping them alive, by letting the guys who have guns NOT get desperate enough to actually use them - and THEN when they are gone, calling the police so they can investigate and hopefully catch them to face JUSTICE. All I can offer is vengeance, justice is better. If I do decide to fight, I'm STILL better off hand-to-hand (or with a kitchen knife) than with a gun, because if it's a case where the other guy is armed with a gun - then I'd be an idiot and risk my family if I try to fight, if he has only a knife or is unarmed, only then could it make sense to try and fight back - in which case I have no qualms about fighting to the death. I just don't have enough of a hero complex to fight back until it would REDUCE the risk to my family, increasing it out of some sense of obligation is... stupid.
Oh here's an interesting tidbit for you - everybody always compares gun-ownership in countries - but there's a much easier way to do the math that rules out ALL of the "but in country X there is also Y" issues. Everywhere in the world where guns are legal, the vast majority of legal gun owners are male. Guess what, so is the vast majority of gun-violence victims. Considering that nearly all women, everywhere are unarmed - why is it that they are not targetted MUCH more than men ? Why are they not victims much more often ? In fact, the very vast majority of times when women ARE victims of gun-crime - the shooter is their own husband or boyfriend. The very person you are arguing has a DUTY to own a gun.
>And you seem to be ignoring the fact that there are other criminals than robbers. When a rapist is trying to force his way upon the female members of your family, I'm sure they will be able to fend them off by giving him their MONEY.
You realize of course that violent rape by strangers is by far the rarest kind - as in it almost never happens. 99% of all sex crimes are committed by somebody the victim knew, and that's WITHOUT factoring in date rape ! What use is a gun against somebody you trusted ? You won't have it when you need it anyway.
Frankly a woman is better off with pepper spray for that scenario.
What you forget - above all - is that the gun MOST likely to kill anybody is statistically his OWN gun. And the person MOST likely to be pulling the trigger is HIMSELF, the SECOND most likely is a member of his direct family - a stranger is very, very distant third.
>Guns in the hands of the general population also serve as a deterrent. A criminal doesn't know who does and doesn't have one. Maybe he knows he can have his own out first, but then he knows he can be locked up for murder. It is impossible to measure how many crimes are prevented by this knowledge.
All that does is encourage him to walk into the place he is about to rob with his gun already drawn, cocked and loaded. Exactly like he would do if he was robbing a place that he KNOWS has armed security - such as a bank, he would still want to avoid actually using the weapon, but if somebody else draws one he wants to be certain he gets the shot off first.
>One can see however that there is far more violence per-person in the cities, most of which have stricter gun laws than in the country where everybody knows that a good percentage are armed, even if only with hunting weapons.
There are FAR more evidence for the many other explanations for this - including the fact that rural environments tend to have far fewer slums. There is probably no greater breeding ground for crime than slum-poverty and those who profit from it.
If you really want to make yourself safer from guns - fight for minimum living standards that HAVE to be maintained by landlords. Fight for better and cheaper education. Fight for urban renewal projects and public parks in slums.
>Shockingly, criminals won't be rushing to turn their guns in if there ever were a blanket ban. On the other hand you will be taking them out of the hands of the people getting assaulted so at least it'll be safer for the people doing the assaulting.
Of course you ignore the fact that the vast majority of the criminals are in it for MONEY - not violence, violence is just a means to an end and the very existence of a criminal justice system gives them a strong motivation to use as little of it as they can succeed with. If the threat of a gun is enough then the worst risk they face is an armed-robbery charge, if they USE the gun they face murder or attempted murder - which has a much higher penalty. Therefore, if you ARE in fact the victim of a crime, carrying a gun INCREASES the risk of the crime actually being violent, and since YOU as a law abiding citizen have your gun safely stored with the ammo separate and the safety catch on (and carry it with the catch on) the criminal has the advantage ANYWAY in a gun-fight - HE hasn't got the safety on, and if you force him into a gunfight HE does not get to claim self-defense, he has every reason now to shoot to kill (so he can get away) and coming prepared means he has better odds of doing so.
In every possible way, being armed only INCREASES your risk of dying from violent crime. It doesn't increase (or decrease) your risk of being a crime victim, but it massively increases the risk that if you are, you will not survive.
The mathematics simply do not add up to support the idea that mass-civilian gun ownership makes people safer from crime - the idea makes NO sense.
The people who embrace it do so to mask a deep and perverse desire to get to kill somebody one day. Because killing sprees are illegal and they are not entirely insane - they have this big day-dream fantasy of somebody attacking them so they can blow his brains out and be a hero.
In the very circumstances where they imagine they would be heroes it turns out that a "hero" is somebody who gets other innocent people killed.
I live in the country with the highest violent crime rate in the world - and I refuse to own a fire-arm. I do own a bow because I practise archery for sport, but even THAT I refuse to store in my house (despite being a million times safer to have there than a gun) - it's stored in a secured lock-up facility provided (at a fee) by our archery club. But then - I really hope I will NEVER have to take any other person's life - even somebody you call a "bad guy". I don't have your hero-complex fantasy which has about as much realistic basis as dreaming that you will get to become an astronaught and fuck a pornstar on the ISS one day.
>It's a good idea, but if you think it will solve the budget problem, you need to go spend an hour on Wikipedia looking at the numbers, because you don't know what you are talking about.
I never said it would. The US's budget problems have no single solution - it will require a significant level of effort on many different solutions which need to be done in concert if it's to be solved, reducing the defence budget is just one tiny part of that over-all solution... oh wait I SAID in my original post that the solution would involve BOTH spending cuts AND higher taxes... and I suspect that's not enough. The US will have to find other sources of revenue, at least for a while, FOREIGN revenue. And since nobody is going to give you aid, you'll have to actually have your government start making MONEY out of all your foreign trading companies. That is to say - start getting the big corporations to pay THEIR taxes.
>I guess the point is that they have all been wrong but people keep making them. They never seem to learn about predictions not working.
A major factor ignored by this thinking is this: the vast majority of "doomsday predictions" are NOT in fact pessimistic claims of "The end is nigh" (especially today). And this lumps genuine scientific concerns in with "Mayan prophecy" idiots - as if they have anything in common. In fact the vast majority of doomsday prophecies both today and right back to ancient times (compare all the ones in ancient writings like the Old Testament) are self-unfullfilling prophecies. The very PURPOSE of making the prophecy is to prevent itself from coming true: they are not saying "we are all going to die" - they are saying: "repent or face the consequences" - with the sincere hope that people will, in fact, repent.
Take an easy example - in the mid-90's when we became aware of Y2K problem computer scientists predicted massive chaos if it wasn't fixed. They were not saying "the world is going to end" - they WERE saying "fix the problem OR the world is going to be in trouble". So we fixed the problem - millions of techs around the world who worked very, very hard fixing computers to solve that problem before it happened - and we almost entirely averted the crisis. What was left was one nuclear plant that shut down and a few minor inconveniences (like a centenarian born in 1903 who was told she couldn't vote in the 2004 elections because the system thought she was only 1 year old).
Many people subsequently claimed that the whole thing was overblown. It wasn't. The problem and it's potential impact was very, very real - it didn't happen because we invested time, money and ingenuity enough to solve it IN TIME.
So this spouting-line completely ignores all the doomsday prophecies that MAY or WOULD have come true except that people DID "repent".
The closest the doomsday clock ever got to midnight was 2-minutes two midnight during the Cuban Missile Crisis (this is what inspired the Iron Maiden song: 2 minutes to midnight). It was an accurate prediction of the level of threat of nuclear war at the time. The world has never been at so high a risk of a nuclear war since, and so the clock has never been there again.
Now whether the doomsday clock is a good or bad way to represent the IDEA of the risk to the population can be debated, but to imagine that "because the world has never ended, it obviously never will" is er... fucking stupid.
>The Tea Party has consistently argued for spending cuts. If you imagine that the debt can be addressed by increasing taxes, then you have no conception of the scale of the problem.
And if you imagine that it's an either/or problem then you're a complete idiot who can't do math. The US will require BOTH spending cuts AND tax increases in order to ever ballance it's budget again.
Here's an idea for a good spending cut: STOP MAKING WAR ON EVERYBODY ! You do know that the Afghanistan war costs more in a day than the entire Shuttle program used to cost in a YEAR ! ?
There is also the fact that even where precedent does not apply judges do look strongly at what other judges in similar cases elsewhere had found and consider their rulings very highly when making their own determinations. It's still quite common for example for Judges in the US to look at rulings under British case-law where similar cases were decided although British courts have no precedent-power over US ones, the findings of those judges are useful. For starters if there are evidentiary differences it may well be useful to ask "why" (particularly when the same companies are involved).
>Thanks for an informative post. I already have three battery-powered flashes, two mains-powered studio flashes and an RF trigger set, so I'm covered there, and I must say proper flash photography is a lot of fun (Strobist and cheap ebay equipment got to me...)
That's a decent setup - my own kit is mostly from second-hand purchases as well so I can appreciate that.
>The background is plain ( e.g. white paper table cloth) In general I would recommend avoiding white backgrounds - dark blue, gray or black is usually better unless you compensate for the reflection in your flash. More importantly the high amount of white in the picture will throw off the camera's sensors so you cannot even use them as a guide for exposure (in practise you almost HAVE to over-expose a white background to get the subject correctly lit).
>Would the purpose of shooting this in RAW instead of JPEG be that the e.g. 1/3 stop I'll have to adjust it in gimp will be better based on the RAW than the JPEG? Or would it be more that the RAW lets me get more creative in post-processing, playing around with curves and colors to turn the picture into something significantly different from what my camera captured?
Both. The adjustment in RAW will produce a better quality outcome. Now the amount of modification you want to do will vary. Many of my pictures contain nothing but RAW editing, while others are significantly adjusted (for example taking a portrait and trying to reproduce the kind of post production that Diana Holga invented) - it's nice to have the option even if you rarely use it. Even more subtly there are things like pimples. Even for a picture I will barely be editing I would generally get rid of those, pimples are temporary blemishes and they are not representative of the person and have no place in their memories as far as I'm concerned. I mostly do glamour and erotic-art photography, often with models who pay me for portfolio work and that also comes with expectations to show them just a little prettier than they really are. In those cases I would often create a layer from the background, blue the hell out of it (gaussian blur with 50 pixel radius in both directions) and then slowly adjust it's opacity down till I find that perfect balance between soft skin and impossible perfection (though one of my all-time favourite shots I deliberately pushed it up until the girl's face looked as plastic as a Barbie-doll and named the picture "perfectly flawed" to make a point).
So the degree of value you may expect from RAW shots really depend on what you do with your pictures. For the kind of scenario you describe - I would say the biggest advantage is that you get the power to make subtle adjustments to lighting. Studio lights give you picture-perfect setups but they don't really adapt well to the nuances of a specific shot. Depending on how your daughter was posed, what you want to stand out and remember in one picture may be subtly different from another - RAW gives you the power to make those subtle changes with little or no loss in quality.
Define "correct". If you define it as "closest as possible to the actual colour of the subject" then you have something of a point (not much) - but in fact you will be surprised what lovely and subtle effects you can sometimes obtain by deliberately using the wrong one. Take a picture with studio-flash white-ballance, and open it in RAW and then see what it looks like with Tungsten WB - 99% of the time you will hate the result - but 1% of the time you'll find a work of art you would never have had if you hadn't used RAW. That 1% is enough to be worth it.
I'll try to answer as well. My previous DSLR a Canon 400D couldn't do Raw+Jpeg so I used ONLY raw, for things like "holiday snaps" style shooting I'd just mass-export to jpeg, but for real work I'd always use the RAW. With my new 40D I use Raw+Jpeg for shooting but I'm tempted to go to pure RAW as I've yet to use the jpeg, I figured it may be useful for a reference (what the camera thought was there) but otherwise, no thanks.
1) 1) For a reasonably well-exposed photo where the white balance is roughly correct in the camera, are you able to produce a significantly better end result from RAW than from JPEG?
For me the first part of post-processing is playing with the RAW - for example sometimes I will deliberately switch it to a different white balance or even do manual white balance to achieve some or other artistic effect. Raw is also very powerful for adjusting things like the global saturation and contrast levels very finely (while you'll want a tool like photoshop or gimp to adjust individual elements).
>2) Do you have any rough idea about the bit depth the RAW photos need to be at before you get a significant advantage over JPEG? My old camera produced 10 bit RAWs, and at that time I was almost never able to out-perform the JPEG. My new camera has 12 bit RAW, and I haven't really had much time recently (small children here as well) to play around with RAW. But maybe it would be worth it?
It doesn't much matter. If you are taking snapshots then just use jpeg. RAW comes into it's own if you're doing real photography - product shoots, studio work, landscape work, art photography etc. - where the post-production is as important a part of the process as the taking of the shot. RAW is stage one of producing the perfect image, gimp/photoshop is stage 2. Even those photographers who eschew editing of pictures will usually do RAW adjustment - which doesn't change what's there, only how it's 'presented' in terms of light. Personally I point out to those types that there is nothing I can do in gimp/photoshop that the old boys didn't use to do in the dark-room, it's just faster, easer and a LOT cheaper.
For the most part a human cannot on a computer screen tell the difference between a 6MP camera (the smallest DSLR I know off) and an 18MP one since no common desktop/laptop screen could show such a picture full-size anyway you're seeing a distorted/shrunken version to begin with, but where it DOES matter is prints. I do prints of my best work and some have also been printed in magazines like Marie Claire and when you're doing prints you need to provide the images in the right level. Generally you will want to ensure they are scaled to page size (e.g. A3 for example) yourself - and that means including white-space bordering to prevent stretching - and you'll need to ensure they are high print-resolution (professional printing should be 300 DPI). Format wise uncompressed jpeg is usually used. Simple reality is that to get an uncompressed jpeg at 300DPI that is A3 in size you need a high MP shot to begin with or your picture simply won't look good at that resolution. RAW is invaluable here as it lets you handle such things as exposure levels much better. You cannot just yank up the exposure of a picture - if you do that you create lots of digital noise (which shows up as red-speckle) which no amount of editing can ever REALLY cover up properly - but in RAW you can subtly adjust lighting to make a useful picture from a slightly underexposed shot sometimes anyway. On 800x600 web-quality jpegs you'll never even NOTICE the noise being created in typical "push up the exposure" steps - but if you print that as an A3 poster for framing every one of those red dots is a glaring monstrosity.
The first and finest art of ALL photography is lighting, don't think you can fix bad lighting in post, at best you can maybe make a useful website picture. If you are trying to do anything that's printable - you need to get your light right. The purpose of editing (both RAW and gimp) is to modify a
>>OK, just fess up - it's your pr0n collection, right? 1TB of images at a gargantuan 20MB apiece is over 50000 images; at a more reasonable 5MB that increases to 200k+. "Hobby photographer" my foot.
>You've clearly never heard of RAW-images. 20MB RAW-image is actually still on the smaller end of the scale.
And 50000 is the approximate useful actuator operations on most higher-end DSLRs - most photographers who use them are on their third or fourth one by now.
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>What exactly are the health care costs of carbon dioxide?
Hard to calculate since it's an externality, and hard to prove. The kid in Cape Town who gets asthma could be getting it due to pollution in China !
But you can probably take at least the vast majority of respiratory illnesses.
>and plenty of contributors that do not have health consequences (like CO2).
This statement is false. CO2 is toxic at fairly low levels actually.
>So, I'd really like to see that bill that you say is going to tax solar generators, as it'll affect me. I'm not aware of it though - the only measures I've heard were about the government trying to renege on it's 60c rate guarantee because the people not on solar were pissed off at subsidising people who are on solar.
I read about it on theregister.co.uk - look it up yourself.
Either way - the subsidies you're claiming is "overgenerous" is far less than the subsidies on fossil fuels already.
I'd be quite happy to say "let the market sort it out" but then it must be JUST the market, no subsidies for ANY energy at all AND externalized costs (which includes AGW) internalized by making all air-pollution outright illegal.
> I truly hope that someday "what they want" is never your daughters (if any) and/or wife. What then?
I can't say that will NEVER happen, but I do know that stranger-rape is by far the least common type of rape and accounts for a minuscule amount of over-all crime. The odd of that ever happening are a billion to one.
If my daughters or wife are ever in that position - it will almost certainly be somebody they know - and he will almost certainly be unarmed. If I were to discover that, you bet your ass I would fight. But if I only find out later, you can also bet your ass I will not rest till he has been prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Frankly - I am more worried about my son being seduced by a female teacher (which is a much more common form of rape) and then dealing with the difficulties of getting female rapists prosecuted. The odds of THAT happening is MUCH higher.
Now of course, my system is ... not perfect, you cannot EVER be prepared for EVERY scenario - but you can try to rationally (instead of emotionally) analyze risks (using mathematics not emotive arguments like 'duty') - and make the safest over-all choices.
Rationally analyzed, the highest degree of safety I can give my family is definitely to NOT have any ranged projectile weapons in my house. Because this is a FACT and not an opinion - that is true for virtually EVERY person's house.
I don't favour gun bans - but I do favour strict gun control, including a license that requires a competency test which has to be RETAKEN no more than every 3 years. That alone will make a big difference for those who really ARE exceptions to the rule.
It's been argued that "once you implement such controls, it's easy enough to abuse them" - I don't agree - there is a VERY easy way to prevent that. Simply make it compulsary for law enforcement officers to comply with EVERY gun law that any citizen has to comply with. They will NEVER disarm THEMSELVES.
The fact that in America cops have to recertified for weapons usage regularly but untrained civilians do not is a situation that I can only describe as: batshit crazy.
Okay... so in short - you didn't even read the fucking summary ?!?!?
This is NOT about "how they track vehicles". The Judge said "you cannot track vehicles without a warrant" - as a result, the FBI has been falling back on OTHER ways to track people without a warrant. This was a request to reveal what tracking methods they use WITHOUT a warrant.
> Today, America's enemies aren't nations - they're more often underground organizations of people (including American citizens) who disregard American laws.
And these people, citizens or not, still have rights. If you can't enforce the law without violating those rights - then you need to change the law. The are not a country at war with you and cannot be treated like enemy combatants.
But if you meant "terrists" instead of "criminals" then your case is even WEAKER. You have about a 95% higher risk of dying from SUICIDE than from a terrorist attack.
You, personally, is a MUCH higher threat to your safety.
So in this case you are sacrificing essential liberty for NON-EXISTENT temporary safety, to paraphrase Ben Franklin.
tl;dr - There is no freedom more essential than the right to KNOW the laws you live under.
And if nobody ever eats seafood again, that's a small price to pay. I mean the great white has survived the K2 event and that wiped out the dinosaurs so I'm SURE it will survive your algae blanket !
>Do you also believe that the gas companies send agents around the world to assassinate researchers every time they get close to discovering "free energy" or carburetors that will make any car in the world get 100 mpg?
Two words: Ken Saro-Wiwa.
I'm going to guess its something like: "If we reveal our policies, then criminals will know our policies and figure out ways around them or loopholes to avoid them".
Complete bullshit, but the kind of thinking that people in the system readily embrace.
>I honestly have no idea what you were talking about in the rest of your post.
Me neither. I was going to pass his post through google translate but they still don't support moronese.
>Looking at the measures countries are taking with AGW, it looks like the "better world" will consist of one where power producers are taxed more, and household power bills increase. Um, yay?
Firstly - that's bullshit, the money saved on healthcare costs alone will be far larger than what is spent on additional energy costs even if you were right.
To get the TRUE price of fossil fuels we would have to demand they run with zero-pollution, only then are we internalizing the costs that pollution is exerting on the consumer. Do you really think coal power plants would still cost so little if they had to filter every pollutant out and store it safely instead of pumping it into the air and making us pay for the results ?
But even though it would cost a fortune more to have clean coal, it would STILL cost LESS than we ALREADY spend on healthcare caused by pollution.
And then your basic assumptions is false anyway:
*More green energy would cost LESS to produce in the medium because fuel is not having to be paid for - in fact, many of them are cheaper even in the short term.
*In Australia there is already measure being proposed to tax people who generate some of their power off-grid from solar. The massive reductions in their power bills from doing so is causing a major price depression on the power plants. So much so that the crony-capitalism of the power generators are trying to demand people can only get HALF the power they generate themselves off their bill !
So who is trying to prevent normal market operations now ?
The REAL truth is that investment in green energy even on the SMALL scale of "my house during daylight hours while using grid at night" is already adding competition that drives down prices for consumers. More green energy on the large scale will only increase this.
No my friend - fossil energy companies are battling AGW measures because that is their excuse to prevent anybody from investing in renewable energy. They don't want people investing in renewable energy because they don't want the competition. Competition drives down prices - which is good for consumers, but bad for incumbents. The entire anti-AGW campaign is nothing but classic monopolist behaviour by an incumbent industry trying all in their power to prevent the rise of competing products that can and will consistently undercut it and will only be able to undercut it FURTHER over time as initial investments are paid off and production is scaled up.
So your ENTIRE resistance is an ad hominem attack ? "There are scam artists cashing in on AGW - therefore I refuse to listen to the concerned scientists or give credence to the theory".
There are scam artists in everything. There were scam artists in the Y2K days - but that doesn't mean the crisis wasn't real. Some of the money spent averting that crisis went to scam artists, but if we hadn't spent ANY money we would NOT have averted the crisis and it would have been disastrous.
Now you're saying that because some scam artists exists in the energy world, we should not spend any money on solving the identified problem.
That's ... a batshit insane conclusion.
>You are making a huge pile of assumptions here while also completely ignoring my point. A gun ban will disarm only the law abiding. Period. That isn't a matter for debate unless you have some evidence that says criminals will perform the highly illogical act of rushing to turn in their weapons.
I make no such assumption. Sure the criminals will have guns - but if the citizenry is NOT armed - they will hardly ever USE them.
>Reading your entire comment and considering that you won't even keep a bloody bow in your house seems to indicate to me that you've got giant projection issues
You're an idiot then. I have no fear that I'll lash out with my bow, but I know that accidents happen. I would prefer my children have ZERO risk of finding it, playing with it and perhaps injuring themselves. Now considering that even if they did - the risk of injuring yourself with a bow is MUCH lower than a gun - imagine how I feel about guns.
>You also make the, in my opinion, irrational decision of living in what you call the country with the highest violent crime rate as a defenseless sheep.
I've been a victim of crime twice - and BECAUSE I was unarmed, I remain alive. Because I did NOT have a gun, they didn't kill me to steal it. Because I didn't have a gun, they were content to wave theirs in my face without pulling the trigger.
My country also has a per capita legal gun-ownership rate JUST lower than the USA's - and guess what, it has done NOTHING to reduce the crime rate.
I guess in your case that will mean calling the police and praying to God they get their in time to do more than just fill out the paperwork ... stupid.
No, in my case it means keeping them alive, by letting the guys who have guns NOT get desperate enough to actually use them - and THEN when they are gone, calling the police so they can investigate and hopefully catch them to face JUSTICE.
All I can offer is vengeance, justice is better.
If I do decide to fight, I'm STILL better off hand-to-hand (or with a kitchen knife) than with a gun, because if it's a case where the other guy is armed with a gun - then I'd be an idiot and risk my family if I try to fight, if he has only a knife or is unarmed, only then could it make sense to try and fight back - in which case I have no qualms about fighting to the death. I just don't have enough of a hero complex to fight back until it would REDUCE the risk to my family, increasing it out of some sense of obligation is
Oh here's an interesting tidbit for you - everybody always compares gun-ownership in countries - but there's a much easier way to do the math that rules out ALL of the "but in country X there is also Y" issues.
Everywhere in the world where guns are legal, the vast majority of legal gun owners are male. Guess what, so is the vast majority of gun-violence victims. Considering that nearly all women, everywhere are unarmed - why is it that they are not targetted MUCH more than men ? Why are they not victims much more often ?
In fact, the very vast majority of times when women ARE victims of gun-crime - the shooter is their own husband or boyfriend. The very person you are arguing has a DUTY to own a gun.
>And you seem to be ignoring the fact that there are other criminals than robbers. When a rapist is trying to force his way upon the female members of your family, I'm sure they will be able to fend them off by giving him their MONEY.
You realize of course that violent rape by strangers is by far the rarest kind - as in it almost never happens. 99% of all sex crimes are committed by somebody the victim knew, and that's WITHOUT factoring in date rape !
What use is a gun against somebody you trusted ? You won't have it when you need it anyway.
Frankly a woman is better off with pepper spray for that scenario.
What you forget - above all - is that the gun MOST likely to kill anybody is statistically his OWN gun. And the person MOST likely to be pulling the trigger is HIMSELF, the SECOND most likely is a member of his direct family - a stranger is very, very distant third.
>Guns in the hands of the general population also serve as a deterrent. A criminal doesn't know who does and doesn't have one. Maybe he knows he can have his own out first, but then he knows he can be locked up for murder. It is impossible to measure how many crimes are prevented by this knowledge.
All that does is encourage him to walk into the place he is about to rob with his gun already drawn, cocked and loaded. Exactly like he would do if he was robbing a place that he KNOWS has armed security - such as a bank, he would still want to avoid actually using the weapon, but if somebody else draws one he wants to be certain he gets the shot off first.
>One can see however that there is far more violence per-person in the cities, most of which have stricter gun laws than in the country where everybody knows that a good percentage are armed, even if only with hunting weapons.
There are FAR more evidence for the many other explanations for this - including the fact that rural environments tend to have far fewer slums. There is probably no greater breeding ground for crime than slum-poverty and those who profit from it.
If you really want to make yourself safer from guns - fight for minimum living standards that HAVE to be maintained by landlords. Fight for better and cheaper education. Fight for urban renewal projects and public parks in slums.
Now those things will make you safer !
>Shockingly, criminals won't be rushing to turn their guns in if there ever were a blanket ban. On the other hand you will be taking them out of the hands of the people getting assaulted so at least it'll be safer for the people doing the assaulting.
Of course you ignore the fact that the vast majority of the criminals are in it for MONEY - not violence, violence is just a means to an end and the very existence of a criminal justice system gives them a strong motivation to use as little of it as they can succeed with. If the threat of a gun is enough then the worst risk they face is an armed-robbery charge, if they USE the gun they face murder or attempted murder - which has a much higher penalty.
Therefore, if you ARE in fact the victim of a crime, carrying a gun INCREASES the risk of the crime actually being violent, and since YOU as a law abiding citizen have your gun safely stored with the ammo separate and the safety catch on (and carry it with the catch on) the criminal has the advantage ANYWAY in a gun-fight - HE hasn't got the safety on, and if you force him into a gunfight HE does not get to claim self-defense, he has every reason now to shoot to kill (so he can get away) and coming prepared means he has better odds of doing so.
In every possible way, being armed only INCREASES your risk of dying from violent crime. It doesn't increase (or decrease) your risk of being a crime victim, but it massively increases the risk that if you are, you will not survive.
The mathematics simply do not add up to support the idea that mass-civilian gun ownership makes people safer from crime - the idea makes NO sense.
The people who embrace it do so to mask a deep and perverse desire to get to kill somebody one day. Because killing sprees are illegal and they are not entirely insane - they have this big day-dream fantasy of somebody attacking them so they can blow his brains out and be a hero.
In the very circumstances where they imagine they would be heroes it turns out that a "hero" is somebody who gets other innocent people killed.
I live in the country with the highest violent crime rate in the world - and I refuse to own a fire-arm. I do own a bow because I practise archery for sport, but even THAT I refuse to store in my house (despite being a million times safer to have there than a gun) - it's stored in a secured lock-up facility provided (at a fee) by our archery club.
But then - I really hope I will NEVER have to take any other person's life - even somebody you call a "bad guy". I don't have your hero-complex fantasy which has about as much realistic basis as dreaming that you will get to become an astronaught and fuck a pornstar on the ISS one day.
I am a silent coder, I make up for it the rest of the time.
>It's a good idea, but if you think it will solve the budget problem, you need to go spend an hour on Wikipedia looking at the numbers, because you don't know what you are talking about.
I never said it would. The US's budget problems have no single solution - it will require a significant level of effort on many different solutions which need to be done in concert if it's to be solved, reducing the defence budget is just one tiny part of that over-all solution... oh wait I SAID in my original post that the solution would involve BOTH spending cuts AND higher taxes... and I suspect that's not enough. The US will have to find other sources of revenue, at least for a while, FOREIGN revenue. And since nobody is going to give you aid, you'll have to actually have your government start making MONEY out of all your foreign trading companies.
That is to say - start getting the big corporations to pay THEIR taxes.
>I guess the point is that they have all been wrong but people keep making them. They never seem to learn about predictions not working.
A major factor ignored by this thinking is this: the vast majority of "doomsday predictions" are NOT in fact pessimistic claims of "The end is nigh" (especially today). And this lumps genuine scientific concerns in with "Mayan prophecy" idiots - as if they have anything in common.
In fact the vast majority of doomsday prophecies both today and right back to ancient times (compare all the ones in ancient writings like the Old Testament) are self-unfullfilling prophecies. The very PURPOSE of making the prophecy is to prevent itself from coming true: they are not saying "we are all going to die" - they are saying: "repent or face the consequences" - with the sincere hope that people will, in fact, repent.
Take an easy example - in the mid-90's when we became aware of Y2K problem computer scientists predicted massive chaos if it wasn't fixed. They were not saying "the world is going to end" - they WERE saying "fix the problem OR the world is going to be in trouble".
So we fixed the problem - millions of techs around the world who worked very, very hard fixing computers to solve that problem before it happened - and we almost entirely averted the crisis. What was left was one nuclear plant that shut down and a few minor inconveniences (like a centenarian born in 1903 who was told she couldn't vote in the 2004 elections because the system thought she was only 1 year old).
Many people subsequently claimed that the whole thing was overblown. It wasn't. The problem and it's potential impact was very, very real - it didn't happen because we invested time, money and ingenuity enough to solve it IN TIME.
So this spouting-line completely ignores all the doomsday prophecies that MAY or WOULD have come true except that people DID "repent".
The closest the doomsday clock ever got to midnight was 2-minutes two midnight during the Cuban Missile Crisis (this is what inspired the Iron Maiden song: 2 minutes to midnight). It was an accurate prediction of the level of threat of nuclear war at the time. The world has never been at so high a risk of a nuclear war since, and so the clock has never been there again.
Now whether the doomsday clock is a good or bad way to represent the IDEA of the risk to the population can be debated, but to imagine that "because the world has never ended, it obviously never will" is er... fucking stupid.
>The Tea Party has consistently argued for spending cuts. If you imagine that the debt can be addressed by increasing taxes, then you have no conception of the scale of the problem.
And if you imagine that it's an either/or problem then you're a complete idiot who can't do math. The US will require BOTH spending cuts AND tax increases in order to ever ballance it's budget again.
Here's an idea for a good spending cut: STOP MAKING WAR ON EVERYBODY ! You do know that the Afghanistan war costs more in a day than the entire Shuttle program used to cost in a YEAR ! ?
There is also the fact that even where precedent does not apply judges do look strongly at what other judges in similar cases elsewhere had found and consider their rulings very highly when making their own determinations.
It's still quite common for example for Judges in the US to look at rulings under British case-law where similar cases were decided although British courts have no precedent-power over US ones, the findings of those judges are useful. For starters if there are evidentiary differences it may well be useful to ask "why" (particularly when the same companies are involved).
Like any artform you should know the rules for doing it right - then when you break them, you do it on purpose and it means something.
>Thanks for an informative post. I already have three battery-powered flashes, two mains-powered studio flashes and an RF trigger set, so I'm covered there, and I must say proper flash photography is a lot of fun (Strobist and cheap ebay equipment got to me...)
That's a decent setup - my own kit is mostly from second-hand purchases as well so I can appreciate that.
>The background is plain ( e.g. white paper table cloth)
In general I would recommend avoiding white backgrounds - dark blue, gray or black is usually better unless you compensate for the reflection in your flash. More importantly the high amount of white in the picture will throw off the camera's sensors so you cannot even use them as a guide for exposure (in practise you almost HAVE to over-expose a white background to get the subject correctly lit).
>Would the purpose of shooting this in RAW instead of JPEG be that the e.g. 1/3 stop I'll have to adjust it in gimp will be better based on the RAW than the JPEG? Or would it be more that the RAW lets me get more creative in post-processing, playing around with curves and colors to turn the picture into something significantly different from what my camera captured?
Both. The adjustment in RAW will produce a better quality outcome. Now the amount of modification you want to do will vary. Many of my pictures contain nothing but RAW editing, while others are significantly adjusted (for example taking a portrait and trying to reproduce the kind of post production that Diana Holga invented) - it's nice to have the option even if you rarely use it.
Even more subtly there are things like pimples. Even for a picture I will barely be editing I would generally get rid of those, pimples are temporary blemishes and they are not representative of the person and have no place in their memories as far as I'm concerned.
I mostly do glamour and erotic-art photography, often with models who pay me for portfolio work and that also comes with expectations to show them just a little prettier than they really are. In those cases I would often create a layer from the background, blue the hell out of it (gaussian blur with 50 pixel radius in both directions) and then slowly adjust it's opacity down till I find that perfect balance between soft skin and impossible perfection (though one of my all-time favourite shots I deliberately pushed it up until the girl's face looked as plastic as a Barbie-doll and named the picture "perfectly flawed" to make a point).
So the degree of value you may expect from RAW shots really depend on what you do with your pictures. For the kind of scenario you describe - I would say the biggest advantage is that you get the power to make subtle adjustments to lighting. Studio lights give you picture-perfect setups but they don't really adapt well to the nuances of a specific shot. Depending on how your daughter was posed, what you want to stand out and remember in one picture may be subtly different from another - RAW gives you the power to make those subtle changes with little or no loss in quality.
>with correct WB.
Define "correct".
If you define it as "closest as possible to the actual colour of the subject" then you have something of a point (not much) - but in fact you will be surprised what lovely and subtle effects you can sometimes obtain by deliberately using the wrong one.
Take a picture with studio-flash white-ballance, and open it in RAW and then see what it looks like with Tungsten WB - 99% of the time you will hate the result - but 1% of the time you'll find a work of art you would never have had if you hadn't used RAW.
That 1% is enough to be worth it.
This exact example happened to me after a studio shoot just a week ago:
http://silentcoder.co.za/photography/art/Caryn-Fetish/IMG_1858.jpg/
I'll try to answer as well. My previous DSLR a Canon 400D couldn't do Raw+Jpeg so I used ONLY raw, for things like "holiday snaps" style shooting I'd just mass-export to jpeg, but for real work I'd always use the RAW.
With my new 40D I use Raw+Jpeg for shooting but I'm tempted to go to pure RAW as I've yet to use the jpeg, I figured it may be useful for a reference (what the camera thought was there) but otherwise, no thanks.
1) 1) For a reasonably well-exposed photo where the white balance is roughly correct in the camera, are you able to produce a significantly better end result from RAW than from JPEG?
For me the first part of post-processing is playing with the RAW - for example sometimes I will deliberately switch it to a different white balance or even do manual white balance to achieve some or other artistic effect. Raw is also very powerful for adjusting things like the global saturation and contrast levels very finely (while you'll want a tool like photoshop or gimp to adjust individual elements).
>2) Do you have any rough idea about the bit depth the RAW photos need to be at before you get a significant advantage over JPEG? My old camera produced 10 bit RAWs, and at that time I was almost never able to out-perform the JPEG. My new camera has 12 bit RAW, and I haven't really had much time recently (small children here as well) to play around with RAW. But maybe it would be worth it?
It doesn't much matter. If you are taking snapshots then just use jpeg. RAW comes into it's own if you're doing real photography - product shoots, studio work, landscape work, art photography etc. - where the post-production is as important a part of the process as the taking of the shot. RAW is stage one of producing the perfect image, gimp/photoshop is stage 2. Even those photographers who eschew editing of pictures will usually do RAW adjustment - which doesn't change what's there, only how it's 'presented' in terms of light.
Personally I point out to those types that there is nothing I can do in gimp/photoshop that the old boys didn't use to do in the dark-room, it's just faster, easer and a LOT cheaper.
For the most part a human cannot on a computer screen tell the difference between a 6MP camera (the smallest DSLR I know off) and an 18MP one since no common desktop/laptop screen could show such a picture full-size anyway you're seeing a distorted/shrunken version to begin with, but where it DOES matter is prints. I do prints of my best work and some have also been printed in magazines like Marie Claire and when you're doing prints you need to provide the images in the right level. Generally you will want to ensure they are scaled to page size (e.g. A3 for example) yourself - and that means including white-space bordering to prevent stretching - and you'll need to ensure they are high print-resolution (professional printing should be 300 DPI). Format wise uncompressed jpeg is usually used.
Simple reality is that to get an uncompressed jpeg at 300DPI that is A3 in size you need a high MP shot to begin with or your picture simply won't look good at that resolution.
RAW is invaluable here as it lets you handle such things as exposure levels much better. You cannot just yank up the exposure of a picture - if you do that you create lots of digital noise (which shows up as red-speckle) which no amount of editing can ever REALLY cover up properly - but in RAW you can subtly adjust lighting to make a useful picture from a slightly underexposed shot sometimes anyway. On 800x600 web-quality jpegs you'll never even NOTICE the noise being created in typical "push up the exposure" steps - but if you print that as an A3 poster for framing every one of those red dots is a glaring monstrosity.
The first and finest art of ALL photography is lighting, don't think you can fix bad lighting in post, at best you can maybe make a useful website picture. If you are trying to do anything that's printable - you need to get your light right. The purpose of editing (both RAW and gimp) is to modify a
>>OK, just fess up - it's your pr0n collection, right? 1TB of images at a gargantuan 20MB apiece is over 50000 images; at a more reasonable 5MB that increases to 200k+. "Hobby photographer" my foot.
>You've clearly never heard of RAW-images. 20MB RAW-image is actually still on the smaller end of the scale.
And 50000 is the approximate useful actuator operations on most higher-end DSLRs - most photographers who use them are on their third or fourth one by now.
How is it not less effort to just eat less in the first place ?