Well, when you only buy 2 or 3 games a year like me, it's a lot better to buy the games themselves. That way, I don't have to pay $15/month for the same game. Even if all those individual games cost $60, it comes out ahead for me.
Better check your math. 3 games at $60 each is $180. 12 months at $15/month is... $180. So yes, if you buy only 2 a year you're coming out ahead, but if you buy 3... not so much.
Re:Oh yeah, the VA loss was just an accident...
on
Telecommuting Backlash
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· Score: 4, Informative
What are the odds that the weekend he'd take a dump of the records of 26M veterans home would be the weekend he got robbed?
The agency has acknowledged that the longtime midlevel employee -- who has since been fired -- improperly took the information home on an unsecured personal laptop for three years, apparently without his supervisor's knowledge.
So no, this wasn't just "dumb luck". It was an accident waiting to happen.
Try driving in certain cities where red lights seem to be merely optional. Boston comes to mind. One time when I was there I was going through a green light that had been green for a good 10 to 15 seconds when a van came flying out of the cross street without even slowing down. Fortunately this happened just before I entered the intersection, so he didn't hit me. But had he hit me, would that have been my fault too? Especially since I couldn't see him (due to buildings and parked cars obstructing the view of said cross street) until he was in the intersection.
In Illinois, it is technically illegal to enter an intersection on the yellow.
I don't buy it. If it were illegal to enter on yellow, they would need another color to let you know that the light is about to turn yellow. Otherwise, if you're 5 feet from the intersection going, well, just about any speed, and the light turns, how are you supposed to stop? Maybe if you're already stopped (for example while waiting to turn left) it's illegal to enter on yellow, but there's no way it can be illegal to enter if you're already moving.
I didn't include it because I didn't disagree with it. I was reading your original statement as two separate conditions. But now that I re-read it, that was clearly a misinterpretation.
This only holds if the ice is held under water by the ice on top of it
Shouldn't really matter, as long as it's not being held under the water by anything else. Think about it - there's no difference between two separate ice cubes stacked on top of each other, the one below pushing up on the one above vs. two ice cubes fused together to be one cube. The cube below should just push the top cube even higher above the waterline. As long as they're free-floating, as you say, and not wedged in or anything.
Of course, things like air bubbles in the ice decrease the density of the ice and decrease the amount of water produced by melting that volume of ice,
Yes but those air bubbles reducing the density of the ice also reduce the volume of water displaced by the ice. More of the ice will be above the waterline, so even though less water results from melting the ice, there was less water displaced by the ice to begin with. Thus the air bubbles really shouldn't have an effect.
From the late '30s to the mid-70's the temperature went down. The CO2 believers have no explanation.
Pay better attention then. In summary, human-caused particulate emissions reflect sunlight, offsetting some of the effects of CO2-caused warming. In the past couple decades, this type of pollution has lessened, allowing the CO2-caused warming to reveal itself in all its glory.
Until then, I have to listen to all this noise. sigh.
From the GP: That's only true if all the ice was in the water (to displace it). What about if it's above the water? That ice will contribute to sea levels.
From you: Actually, no.... Greenland also supports a significant ice pack. Since these are supported by the land (not buoyant force), when they melt, they would significantly raise the waterlevel globally.
You're assuming the GP meant the portion of an iceberg that is above the water. But the ice on Greenland is certainly "above the water" as well, and perhaps that's what he meant.
First rain water is esentialy distilled water so it washes out the salt accumilation in the soil; where irrigation is the only source it will build chlorides.
The source of irrigation water has no effect on the amount of rain received. The GP's point is that non-rainwater sources will have salt in them, even if the source is NOT desalinated seawater. So it does not matter what the source of the irrigation water is; if irrigation is the only source, it will build chlorides whether the source is desalinated water or a river/lake/aquifer/whatever.
A perfect example being the stacking of the court with activist conservative judges in anticipation of the opportunity to outlaw abortion from the bench rather than from the Congress.
Speaking as a supporter of abortion rights, what you describe just won't happen. The Supreme Court may overturn Roe, but that would not in itself outlaw abortion. Overturning Roe would just mean that women do not have a constitutionally guaranteed right to an abortion, which would allow states and/or the U.S. Congress to make laws outlawing abortion. This is arguably where the debate belongs anyway - in the state legislatures.
And you think commercial vendors wouldn't come up with some sneaky way around that? For example, giving the software away for free, but requiring an expensive support contract.
I know that analogies prove nothing, but I will turn to one for just a momment. If a person walks into a store, takes a product of the shelf and walks out with it without paying they are a theif. If someone else comes along and pays for it does not make the original person any less of a theif.
-1, Terrible analogy. I mean really. In my scenarios the people are actually acting within the bounds of societal expectations.
I can say for certain that if I started a service where I purchased the first copy of every artistic work for the standard price and then proceeded to "sell" these originals to others for a small fee with a contract that states it must be resold to me for 1/100th the price I charge after one week, alot of people would be crying foul because of lost royalties. In the end this would be perfectly legal, but I would basically be providing a rental service, reaping all the benifits, and the original artist only sells one copy of the work and receives no compensation for the hundreds or thousands of people that enjoy the work.
You sound exactly like the movie industry with the advent of the VCR. Yet the movie rental industry has proved to be a great financial benefit to Hollywood even though they were all up in arms at the beginning. Why? Because rental companies buy huge numbers of movies. And many of the people that rent would never have bought the movie to begin with. As another example, libraries haven't put authors out of business, and you don't even need to pay to rent from a library!
Besides, not every art lends itself to rentals. Movies, games, and books, sure. Music? Not really. Visual arts such as paintings or photography? Not at all.
Interesting... I am an artist, and I find your position entirely foreign and incomprehensible. Let's look at a couple scenarios:
Scenario 1: Person (a) buys a photograph from me for $100. Five years from now, he sells it to person (b) for $100, who also keeps it for five years.
Scenario 2: Person (c) buys a photograph from me for $100 and keeps it for ten years.
At the end of these ten years, in both scenarios there has been a net transaction value of $100. All $100 of this is in my pocket. Also in both scenarios, only one of my photographs has left my hands (I did not lose a second photograph when the first was sold, nor did a second come into being). In both scenarios my photograph has gotten ten years of use. The only difference is that in the first scenario this use was split between two people, whereas in the second it was a single person. So how is this anything like theft? The only way I lose out is if person (a) sells to person (b) for a (inflation-adjusted) profit. But this is generally unlikely during an artist's lifetime, and would basically never happen with mass-produced works such as CDs, DVDs, and games.
You may argue that person (a) selling to person (b) cost me a sale because person (b) did not buy directly from me. But maybe I raised my prices when person (b) decided to buy, and he didn't like my higher prices. Maybe person (a) actually sold it for a loss, and person (b) was unwilling to pay the full $100. There are a number of reasons why person (b) may never have been a potential sale. Further, person (a) may not have been willing to buy in the first place if there was no secondary market.
The only way you could argue it's theft is if the original purchaser has gotten "full use" out of a work. But it is impossible to get full use out of an item that has "unlimited usage", as you put it. Say I buy a DVD, for example. I watch it 100 times. I watch it so many times I don't think I could ever watch it again. Have I gotten full use out of it? No, of course not - I could change my mind and watch it 100 more times. Or I could sell it after those initial 100 screenings, and the purchaser could watch it 100 times. Either way, the DVD is getting watched 200 times. The copyright owners didn't lose out by having the secondary purchaser watch it 100 times any more than they lost out by me watching it 100 more times.
Really what this sounds like, though, is a thinly-veiled desire to do away with "unlimited usage" items entirely and, for example, make DVDs self-destruct after x number of viewings. Because, you know, me getting 400 hours of enjoyment out of a $15 DVD just HAS to be theft.
The 'breaking' part of breaking and entering refers to breaking the threshold. According to my highschool law class (yeah, I'm pulling out the big guns here), even if theres a hole in the wall, its breaking and entering.
Not according to Wikipedia. Their article claims that under the original common law definition of burglary, it was not considered "breaking" if a person entered a house through an open door or window. It would still be considered "entering", but since "breaking" was a prerequisite for a charge of burglary, a burglary had thus not taken place under this definition.
I didn't do any other checking, so you can take the Wikipedia cite with the usual grain of salt.
But its still a violation of their rights to spy on them because there is no probable _cause_. There is probable crime, but no foreknowledge by the police and a judge of intent or extent or specifics for a warrant.
A warrant requires language to search for specific items at a specific place at a specific time. Typically, a search warrant is ordered to search people and private property in order to seize suspected contraband and/or criminal evidence.
Pen registers don't require warrants. They require only that investigators show that "the information likely to be obtained is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation" (from Wikipedia). Any judge should issue this for a "known nutjob", assuming that's a euphemism for "ties to known terrorists". Listening to the content of the call is clearly a different story.
You can't see exactly what you will photograph. You get 95% usually.
Who cares? The outside 5% is irrelevant anyway. If you're framing a print, that 5% will be covered by the frame or mat. And it's still much better than parallax error, which is what you get if you use some P&S cameras without using the LCD. My dad has a whole card full of pictures of halves of flowers because of this. Oh and this 95% bit is not new to digital SLRs, film SLRs had the same thing.
Now, take the picture. Whee. You can't, until the silly viewfinder contraption moves out of the way. That's lag.
If the lag on dSLRs was as much as a P&S, you'd have a point. Even in absolute terms the lag is minimal, and not really noticeable. Specs on the Canon 30D claim 65 milliseconds when prefocused. This is about half of the average human's reaction time. And again, not new to dSLRs.
You also get vibration.
Which is utterly irrelevant at most "typical" shutter speeds, i.e. those faster than 1/50 of a second or so. It is also irrelevant at speeds longer than 1 second. For those in-between speeds, mirror lock-up is available. One more that's not new to dSLRs.
Because of the mirror, the lens-to-sensor distance can not be small. This makes wide-angle lenses expensive and shitty. (more distortion, more abherrations, etc.)
Hmm, more crap. While Canon's 10-22mm (16-35mm 35mm equiv) may be expensive, that has nothing to do with the lens-to-sensor distance. Compare it to the 16-35mm and it's downright cheap. Though that's not entirely fair since the 16-35 is a constant f/2.8. The 10-22 is just about identical in price with the 17-40 though. And as for being "shitty", the 10-22 is widely considered to be very non-shitty.
Oh and if you have a full-frame dSLR, you can use the non-shitty 16-35 or 17-40 just as you would on a 35mm camera.
I don't disagree with you that an electronic shutter would be better (less mechanical parts, faster flash sync speed, etc). I do disagree that an electronic viewfinder would be better. EVFs will have to get much better than they are before they will be capable of useful manual focusing. The LCD screens can be very difficult to see in bright light. There is currently some small amount of lag between moving the camera and the view updating. Etc.
Rarely, huh? First, all terrain is featureless when you're in the woods. If you don't think so, try hiking in thicker woods. In the northeast at least, visibility to surrounding terrain features that are significant enough to show up on a map (i.e. something bigger than that boulder next to you) is often zero.
Second, to what accuracy are you determining the location of the sun on a thick overcast (or worse, rainy) day? To within ten, twenty, or thirty degrees, if at all? Sorry, not good enough for the navigation I'm interested in. And such overcast days tend to happen a lot in my part of the world.
Third, you have clearly never kayaked on the ocean if you don't think that will be a problem. Think thick fog obscuring the sun and all landmarks, and sea conditions so bad that taking a hand off the paddle for even a moment can result in a capsize. Even hand-held compasses are useless in such conditions; sea kayakers use a deck-mounted marine compass that attaches on the front of the boat so you can just look down and see your heading. And yes, I've personally been in such conditions.
The compasses in GPS units ("other navigational devices" in the GP's words) should be able to compensate. Since they know where you are on the earth, they'd be able to know what the correct declination is. Anybody with one of these units know for sure?
Take the reading from the compass, add or subtract the correction and that gives you your true heading.
Or, if you're smart/lazy, you buy a compass that lets you dial in the current declination. That way the arrow you line up the needle with is offset by the amount of the declination, which makes the resulting bearing already true. No messy addition/subtraction (and it's always a pain to remember whether you need to add or subtract to get to true). Such compasses go for $50 and up or so.
The stars, with even a rudimentary timepiece, are sufficient to provide a good guide to general direction. Before compasses ever existed, navigation was done based on them.
All the people replying "just use the stars" (and there are a lot of them) are missing the point. Compasses aren't just used by people trying to get across the ocean. Compasses are also used by hikers, kayakers, etc. In short, people with a specific destination who can't afford to wait for night (and a clear one at that) to determine what direction north is. And also people who don't have access to reliable, constant power to run a GPS all day for a week straight. Further, GPS is useless in certain terrain due to lack of line-of-sight to enough satellites, or multi-path error. In short, lack of compass use will be a MAJOR hurdle to safe, efficient navigation for many people.
Do we think of hurricanse... as "minimal threats"? No, we don't. That's my point.
In the United States, yes, we do. Or at least I do. In the record 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, maybe 1700 people were killed in the U.S. Eliminate Katrina, and you're down around 100. And Katrina was the only hurricane in over 75 years to kill more than 1,000 people in the United States. Prior to that there were many more deadly hurricanes, largely because of worse weather forecasting. And that's the point - in response to hurricanes we pour billions into improving our ability to forecast hurricanes through satellites, "hurricane hunter" planes, computer systems for modelling storms, etc etc etc. We don't eliminate people's freedoms or forbid them from building houses anywhere in potentially hurricane-affected areas. Also, hurricanes aren't even on the majority of the population's radar as a direct threat because if you don't live in the southeast, you're almost never affected.
That said, hurricanes have been far more deadly in the Caribbean than in the U.S. but that is largely due to the better building codes, better dissemination of forecasts, and better ability to evacuate (better transportation and more places to go -- it's hard to get too far inland on an island) that all exist in the United States, in addition to the fact that the Caribbean just gets hit more.
Now as for wars, yes, to most Americans those are minimal threats too. When was the last time the U.S. mainland was affected by war? If we eliminate the Nazi subs trolling the water right off the eastern seaboard, or an incident where a Japanese plane started a forest fire in the northwest, then we'd have to go back almost 150 years to the Civil War. It's been 30 years since there was a draft. Even the current war in Iraq has little direct effect on most Americans' lives - I don't know anyone that's over there, for example, and as far as I know, no one I know knows anyone that's over there.
If you want to talk about threats, let's play a little game. During your lifetime, how many people do you know that have been killed by hurricanes? War? Terrorism? My answers are 0, 0, and 0.
Now, how many have been killed by cancer? Just amongst my family, both my grandfathers and a couple great aunts/uncles. If we include those that have cancer but are still alive, we can add one of my grandmothers and my girlfriend's mother and grandfather, not to mention the people I know that are outside of my immediate family.
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Well, when you only buy 2 or 3 games a year like me, it's a lot better to buy the games themselves. That way, I don't have to pay $15/month for the same game. Even if all those individual games cost $60, it comes out ahead for me.
Better check your math. 3 games at $60 each is $180. 12 months at $15/month is... $180. So yes, if you buy only 2 a year you're coming out ahead, but if you buy 3... not so much.
Insightful, eh? How about "uninformed".
From MSNBC: So no, this wasn't just "dumb luck". It was an accident waiting to happen.
Try driving in certain cities where red lights seem to be merely optional. Boston comes to mind. One time when I was there I was going through a green light that had been green for a good 10 to 15 seconds when a van came flying out of the cross street without even slowing down. Fortunately this happened just before I entered the intersection, so he didn't hit me. But had he hit me, would that have been my fault too? Especially since I couldn't see him (due to buildings and parked cars obstructing the view of said cross street) until he was in the intersection.
In Illinois, it is technically illegal to enter an intersection on the yellow.
I don't buy it. If it were illegal to enter on yellow, they would need another color to let you know that the light is about to turn yellow. Otherwise, if you're 5 feet from the intersection going, well, just about any speed, and the light turns, how are you supposed to stop? Maybe if you're already stopped (for example while waiting to turn left) it's illegal to enter on yellow, but there's no way it can be illegal to enter if you're already moving.
The Illinois Rules of the Road say nothing about it being illegal to enter on yellow.
I didn't include it because I didn't disagree with it. I was reading your original statement as two separate conditions. But now that I re-read it, that was clearly a misinterpretation.
This only holds if the ice is held under water by the ice on top of it
Shouldn't really matter, as long as it's not being held under the water by anything else. Think about it - there's no difference between two separate ice cubes stacked on top of each other, the one below pushing up on the one above vs. two ice cubes fused together to be one cube. The cube below should just push the top cube even higher above the waterline. As long as they're free-floating, as you say, and not wedged in or anything.
Of course, things like air bubbles in the ice decrease the density of the ice and decrease the amount of water produced by melting that volume of ice,
Yes but those air bubbles reducing the density of the ice also reduce the volume of water displaced by the ice. More of the ice will be above the waterline, so even though less water results from melting the ice, there was less water displaced by the ice to begin with. Thus the air bubbles really shouldn't have an effect.
From the late '30s to the mid-70's the temperature went down. The CO2 believers have no explanation.
Pay better attention then. In summary, human-caused particulate emissions reflect sunlight, offsetting some of the effects of CO2-caused warming. In the past couple decades, this type of pollution has lessened, allowing the CO2-caused warming to reveal itself in all its glory.
Until then, I have to listen to all this noise. sigh.
Tell me about it.
From the GP:
... Greenland also supports a significant ice pack. Since these are supported by the land (not buoyant force), when they melt, they would significantly raise the waterlevel globally.
That's only true if all the ice was in the water (to displace it). What about if it's above the water? That ice will contribute to sea levels.
From you:
Actually, no.
You're assuming the GP meant the portion of an iceberg that is above the water. But the ice on Greenland is certainly "above the water" as well, and perhaps that's what he meant.
First rain water is esentialy distilled water so it washes out the salt accumilation in the soil; where irrigation is the only source it will build chlorides.
The source of irrigation water has no effect on the amount of rain received. The GP's point is that non-rainwater sources will have salt in them, even if the source is NOT desalinated seawater. So it does not matter what the source of the irrigation water is; if irrigation is the only source, it will build chlorides whether the source is desalinated water or a river/lake/aquifer/whatever.
A perfect example being the stacking of the court with activist conservative judges in anticipation of the opportunity to outlaw abortion from the bench rather than from the Congress.
Speaking as a supporter of abortion rights, what you describe just won't happen. The Supreme Court may overturn Roe, but that would not in itself outlaw abortion. Overturning Roe would just mean that women do not have a constitutionally guaranteed right to an abortion, which would allow states and/or the U.S. Congress to make laws outlawing abortion. This is arguably where the debate belongs anyway - in the state legislatures.
And you think commercial vendors wouldn't come up with some sneaky way around that? For example, giving the software away for free, but requiring an expensive support contract.
If you want great service, It helps to have boobs. I'm not joking.
And this is different from any other service industry how?
I know that analogies prove nothing, but I will turn to one for just a momment. If a person walks into a store, takes a product of the shelf and walks out with it without paying they are a theif. If someone else comes along and pays for it does not make the original person any less of a theif.
-1, Terrible analogy. I mean really. In my scenarios the people are actually acting within the bounds of societal expectations.
I can say for certain that if I started a service where I purchased the first copy of every artistic work for the standard price and then proceeded to "sell" these originals to others for a small fee with a contract that states it must be resold to me for 1/100th the price I charge after one week, alot of people would be crying foul because of lost royalties. In the end this would be perfectly legal, but I would basically be providing a rental service, reaping all the benifits, and the original artist only sells one copy of the work and receives no compensation for the hundreds or thousands of people that enjoy the work.
You sound exactly like the movie industry with the advent of the VCR. Yet the movie rental industry has proved to be a great financial benefit to Hollywood even though they were all up in arms at the beginning. Why? Because rental companies buy huge numbers of movies. And many of the people that rent would never have bought the movie to begin with. As another example, libraries haven't put authors out of business, and you don't even need to pay to rent from a library!
Besides, not every art lends itself to rentals. Movies, games, and books, sure. Music? Not really. Visual arts such as paintings or photography? Not at all.
Interesting... I am an artist, and I find your position entirely foreign and incomprehensible. Let's look at a couple scenarios:
Scenario 1: Person (a) buys a photograph from me for $100. Five years from now, he sells it to person (b) for $100, who also keeps it for five years.
Scenario 2: Person (c) buys a photograph from me for $100 and keeps it for ten years.
At the end of these ten years, in both scenarios there has been a net transaction value of $100. All $100 of this is in my pocket. Also in both scenarios, only one of my photographs has left my hands (I did not lose a second photograph when the first was sold, nor did a second come into being). In both scenarios my photograph has gotten ten years of use. The only difference is that in the first scenario this use was split between two people, whereas in the second it was a single person. So how is this anything like theft? The only way I lose out is if person (a) sells to person (b) for a (inflation-adjusted) profit. But this is generally unlikely during an artist's lifetime, and would basically never happen with mass-produced works such as CDs, DVDs, and games.
You may argue that person (a) selling to person (b) cost me a sale because person (b) did not buy directly from me. But maybe I raised my prices when person (b) decided to buy, and he didn't like my higher prices. Maybe person (a) actually sold it for a loss, and person (b) was unwilling to pay the full $100. There are a number of reasons why person (b) may never have been a potential sale. Further, person (a) may not have been willing to buy in the first place if there was no secondary market.
The only way you could argue it's theft is if the original purchaser has gotten "full use" out of a work. But it is impossible to get full use out of an item that has "unlimited usage", as you put it. Say I buy a DVD, for example. I watch it 100 times. I watch it so many times I don't think I could ever watch it again. Have I gotten full use out of it? No, of course not - I could change my mind and watch it 100 more times. Or I could sell it after those initial 100 screenings, and the purchaser could watch it 100 times. Either way, the DVD is getting watched 200 times. The copyright owners didn't lose out by having the secondary purchaser watch it 100 times any more than they lost out by me watching it 100 more times.
Really what this sounds like, though, is a thinly-veiled desire to do away with "unlimited usage" items entirely and, for example, make DVDs self-destruct after x number of viewings. Because, you know, me getting 400 hours of enjoyment out of a $15 DVD just HAS to be theft.
The 'breaking' part of breaking and entering refers to breaking the threshold. According to my highschool law class (yeah, I'm pulling out the big guns here), even if theres a hole in the wall, its breaking and entering.
Not according to Wikipedia. Their article claims that under the original common law definition of burglary, it was not considered "breaking" if a person entered a house through an open door or window. It would still be considered "entering", but since "breaking" was a prerequisite for a charge of burglary, a burglary had thus not taken place under this definition.
I didn't do any other checking, so you can take the Wikipedia cite with the usual grain of salt.
and you get another opportunity to tell the user to make sure they're not reporting a bug that's already been reported 1000 times).
If the bug's getting reported that often, fix the damn bug already! It's clearly affecting a lot of users.
But its still a violation of their rights to spy on them because there is no probable _cause_. There is probable crime, but no foreknowledge by the police and a judge of intent or extent or specifics for a warrant.
A warrant requires language to search for specific items at a specific place at a specific time. Typically, a search warrant is ordered to search people and private property in order to seize suspected contraband and/or criminal evidence.
Pen registers don't require warrants. They require only that investigators show that "the information likely to be obtained is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation" (from Wikipedia). Any judge should issue this for a "known nutjob", assuming that's a euphemism for "ties to known terrorists". Listening to the content of the call is clearly a different story.
Sounds like you've never actually used a dSLR.
You can't see exactly what you will photograph. You get 95% usually.
Who cares? The outside 5% is irrelevant anyway. If you're framing a print, that 5% will be covered by the frame or mat. And it's still much better than parallax error, which is what you get if you use some P&S cameras without using the LCD. My dad has a whole card full of pictures of halves of flowers because of this. Oh and this 95% bit is not new to digital SLRs, film SLRs had the same thing.
Now, take the picture. Whee. You can't, until the silly viewfinder contraption moves out of the way. That's lag.
If the lag on dSLRs was as much as a P&S, you'd have a point. Even in absolute terms the lag is minimal, and not really noticeable. Specs on the Canon 30D claim 65 milliseconds when prefocused. This is about half of the average human's reaction time. And again, not new to dSLRs.
You also get vibration.
Which is utterly irrelevant at most "typical" shutter speeds, i.e. those faster than 1/50 of a second or so. It is also irrelevant at speeds longer than 1 second. For those in-between speeds, mirror lock-up is available. One more that's not new to dSLRs.
Because of the mirror, the lens-to-sensor distance can not be small. This makes wide-angle lenses expensive and shitty. (more distortion, more abherrations, etc.)
Hmm, more crap. While Canon's 10-22mm (16-35mm 35mm equiv) may be expensive, that has nothing to do with the lens-to-sensor distance. Compare it to the 16-35mm and it's downright cheap. Though that's not entirely fair since the 16-35 is a constant f/2.8. The 10-22 is just about identical in price with the 17-40 though. And as for being "shitty", the 10-22 is widely considered to be very non-shitty.
Oh and if you have a full-frame dSLR, you can use the non-shitty 16-35 or 17-40 just as you would on a 35mm camera.
I don't disagree with you that an electronic shutter would be better (less mechanical parts, faster flash sync speed, etc). I do disagree that an electronic viewfinder would be better. EVFs will have to get much better than they are before they will be capable of useful manual focusing. The LCD screens can be very difficult to see in bright light. There is currently some small amount of lag between moving the camera and the view updating. Etc.
And, just to bring this thread back on topic, in an August 1983 Usenet survey, Andy Tanenbaum received 3 votes as the "biggest jerk using Usenet".
Rarely, huh? First, all terrain is featureless when you're in the woods. If you don't think so, try hiking in thicker woods. In the northeast at least, visibility to surrounding terrain features that are significant enough to show up on a map (i.e. something bigger than that boulder next to you) is often zero.
Second, to what accuracy are you determining the location of the sun on a thick overcast (or worse, rainy) day? To within ten, twenty, or thirty degrees, if at all? Sorry, not good enough for the navigation I'm interested in. And such overcast days tend to happen a lot in my part of the world.
Third, you have clearly never kayaked on the ocean if you don't think that will be a problem. Think thick fog obscuring the sun and all landmarks, and sea conditions so bad that taking a hand off the paddle for even a moment can result in a capsize. Even hand-held compasses are useless in such conditions; sea kayakers use a deck-mounted marine compass that attaches on the front of the boat so you can just look down and see your heading. And yes, I've personally been in such conditions.
The compasses in GPS units ("other navigational devices" in the GP's words) should be able to compensate. Since they know where you are on the earth, they'd be able to know what the correct declination is. Anybody with one of these units know for sure?
Take the reading from the compass, add or subtract the correction and that gives you your true heading.
Or, if you're smart/lazy, you buy a compass that lets you dial in the current declination. That way the arrow you line up the needle with is offset by the amount of the declination, which makes the resulting bearing already true. No messy addition/subtraction (and it's always a pain to remember whether you need to add or subtract to get to true). Such compasses go for $50 and up or so.
The stars, with even a rudimentary timepiece, are sufficient to provide a good guide to general direction. Before compasses ever existed, navigation was done based on them.
All the people replying "just use the stars" (and there are a lot of them) are missing the point. Compasses aren't just used by people trying to get across the ocean. Compasses are also used by hikers, kayakers, etc. In short, people with a specific destination who can't afford to wait for night (and a clear one at that) to determine what direction north is. And also people who don't have access to reliable, constant power to run a GPS all day for a week straight. Further, GPS is useless in certain terrain due to lack of line-of-sight to enough satellites, or multi-path error. In short, lack of compass use will be a MAJOR hurdle to safe, efficient navigation for many people.
Do we think of hurricanse ... as "minimal threats"? No, we don't. That's my point.
In the United States, yes, we do. Or at least I do. In the record 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, maybe 1700 people were killed in the U.S. Eliminate Katrina, and you're down around 100. And Katrina was the only hurricane in over 75 years to kill more than 1,000 people in the United States. Prior to that there were many more deadly hurricanes, largely because of worse weather forecasting. And that's the point - in response to hurricanes we pour billions into improving our ability to forecast hurricanes through satellites, "hurricane hunter" planes, computer systems for modelling storms, etc etc etc. We don't eliminate people's freedoms or forbid them from building houses anywhere in potentially hurricane-affected areas. Also, hurricanes aren't even on the majority of the population's radar as a direct threat because if you don't live in the southeast, you're almost never affected.
That said, hurricanes have been far more deadly in the Caribbean than in the U.S. but that is largely due to the better building codes, better dissemination of forecasts, and better ability to evacuate (better transportation and more places to go -- it's hard to get too far inland on an island) that all exist in the United States, in addition to the fact that the Caribbean just gets hit more.
Now as for wars, yes, to most Americans those are minimal threats too. When was the last time the U.S. mainland was affected by war? If we eliminate the Nazi subs trolling the water right off the eastern seaboard, or an incident where a Japanese plane started a forest fire in the northwest, then we'd have to go back almost 150 years to the Civil War. It's been 30 years since there was a draft. Even the current war in Iraq has little direct effect on most Americans' lives - I don't know anyone that's over there, for example, and as far as I know, no one I know knows anyone that's over there.
If you want to talk about threats, let's play a little game. During your lifetime, how many people do you know that have been killed by hurricanes? War? Terrorism? My answers are 0, 0, and 0.
Now, how many have been killed by cancer? Just amongst my family, both my grandfathers and a couple great aunts/uncles. If we include those that have cancer but are still alive, we can add one of my grandmothers and my girlfriend's mother and grandfather, not to mention the people I know that are outside of my immediate family.