"You cannot hold the President accountable for the actions of another individual abusing the power he has given them."
I'm not given to swearing on slashdot, but BULLSHIT. The president is the Chief of the Executive Branch of our government. He's responsible for what happens there. If someone abuses powers that he's granted them, then he's responsible for terminating that person, and seeing to it that all possible criminal prosecution is carried out.
" So it is ok for this administration to not do anything about preventing future terrorism attacks?"
No, but I think it'd be a great start for the current administration to make future attacks less likely, rather than more likely as they've done.
If the president wants to prevent future terrorist attacks, then he might try figuring out why people are attacking us, rather than simply throwing rocks at whatever moves. IMHO, the actions taken by the current administration have set the US back at least 100 years in our status and respectability in the international community, and have given a reason to hate us to millions of people who have been shown to be quite willing to give their lives up to inflict damage on those they hate. And you see this as making us more safe? Here's a clue-- if the people of the whole world of Islam hate us, a few of them are gonna inflict terrorist harm, no matter how hard we turn the screws on ourselves. Maybe, just maybe, if we tried to work with them, they might not want to blow us up in quite the same way they do now.
I somehow don't think complaining to the local DA (who's responsible for California law) is gonna have a heck of a lot to say about how the FBI conducts itself under Federal law. But if you wanna knock yourself out, please complain to Attorney General Ashcroft. I'm sure he'll pay plenty of attention to your concerns;)
Please. Here in San Diego, the FBI used Patriot Act subpoenas to investigate council members being bribed by strip-club owners as "potential terrorist links". Say goodbye to several of the amendments...
"For several months Shaw contacted me and fed me this line and said either I'd have to reduce my traffic or sign up for a buisness account. "
"-They *will* cut you off, and without warning. (This should be illegal)"
Um, sounds to me like they gave you several months of warning there. Pretty much any business offering "unlimited" anything will apply a "reasonable" limit. You can't go to an all you can eat buffet, take a nap in the booth and start eating again later, just never leaving the restaurant. You can't use your "unlimited minutues" cell phone continuously. These companies (like Shaw) don't fine you, or call the cops, or anything else, when you exceed their limit of reasonableness. They just decide to stop doing business with you. Their right, as a private company.
If you were routing a significant amount of bandwidth back and forth over the cable (must have been to get booted), then they don't care whether you're running P2P or just shoving random bits. You're generating enough traffic to make your local segment problematic for the other cable users, and so they don't care that they've lost your business-- you're not a customer, you're a liability. They warned you, you continued, and then they cut you off. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
Are you suggesting that the ISP should, in order to stick to their "unlimited" adverts, let you saturate their segment with garbage and degrade service to other customers just because you can't be bothered to properly configure your routing? (Running an internal network was probably a violation of their TOS, as well).
"There are no changes in film/print quality to throw you off etc."
That's exactly my point. When you shoot slide film, the final mounted slide is actually the piece film that was inside the camera when you took the shot. As long as it's developed according to manufacturer specs (not a problem if you're shooting modern E-6 process film) there's essentially no variation in the final product you get out. If you did a good job, the slide looks good. If you did a bad job, the slide looks bad. As far as the print looking different, I was talking about a cibachrome (renamed to Ilfochrome, but everybody still calls them cibas;), which is a process for making prints directly from a slide. The colors and quality of reproduction simply blows away anything you can print from a color negative on coated paper-- unfortunately, it's pretty expensive to make them, and most folks don't take the time. If you visit a museum with really incredible looking color prints on the walls, they're probably cibachrome prints.
A modern printing machine can do anything, from taking a great neg and making a crummy print, to making a mediocre print look pretty good. And if you're looking at your digital pics and want a "faithful" reproduction, you have to make sure the color temp and gamma of your monitor is corrected.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not shooting for film snobbery. A lot of really good digital pics get taken all the time. And plenty of great pics have been taken with 35-70 zooms. But if a person wants to learn, nothing's quite like a manual body, 50mm f/1.8 lens, and slide film. I don't start fires with a flint and steel, either. But I learned how, and now I can feel a lot more confident that if I have equipment (i.e. lighter) problems when I'm out camping, I know what to do and how to fix it. Just a personal thing, ya know.
"I believe the word for that sort of action would be `piracy'. At least that's what it would be called if it happened in the open seas, in international waters."
Actually, no, on the open seas that'd be called "salvage". When a vessel goes to anothers assistance in response to an SOS, and saves the lives of the crew, the rescuer gets pretty extensive salvage rights. See the Cornell law library on the subject. Kind of funny, that the grandparent was wrong, the plane can't be confiscated since salvage only applies on the seas. And then your example of how he's wrong is itself wrong, since salvage does apply on the open seas. Ah, slashdot.
Film is definitly more expensive. But good slides on velvia.... Nice. If you've got a great shot, you should definitly save up for a ciba, as a 20x24 will run you about $100 to get printed. I've only done it once;). Worth it, though.
It's all inorganic dyes, so if you keep it behind UV blocking glass it ought to last forever (well, not as long as an archival B&W, but close enough). If you're going to keep it behind glass, get the glossy, classic deluxe (the cheaper print on coated paper won't last as long. The deluxe is on polyesther film). They look totally different from a normal print. More like looking through a window.
"I'm just saying that the 1 in 9 thing doesn't make sense. "
The reason it makes sense is that for the UN to have any relevance whatsoever, it needs all of the superpowers to participate. Superpowers don't like to give up sovereignty. And, being superpowers, it's kind of hard to force them. Without being able to veto anything they don't like, there's no way you'd get the US, or Russia, or China to participate. Just think of how much louder the Birchers (yes, all of you professing the "get out of the UN now!" do have an organization...) would yell if the UN could "force" resolutions on the US. It'd be over with in five minutes, the republicans would be crawling over each other to pass the "kill the UN" bill, and the dems would go along for fear of being wiped out in the next election. As soon as one of the military superpowers walks away from the table, the organization no longer has any relevance (excluding the various service arms of the UN like the WHO).
"I have never enlarged past 8x10, and probably never will. MOST people won't enlarge beyond 8x10 so the MP race is meaningless."
If you get a good shot, you should try it sometime. I've got a really nice 16x20 black and white of a farmstead near my parent's place hanging on my wall. And a really cool 20x24 cibachrome. To do that at 300dpi, you'd need a 43MP camera. Don't have one of those...
I totally agree that "post-shot" modifications are important and necessary. The ultimate goal for most people is to end up with something nice on paper, whether printed with a dichroic head or by a dye-sub printer. And even a perfectly exposed negative will benefit from some dodging or burning during printing. But the original poster wasn't asking about what equipment they needed to make the best images, they wanted to know how to learn to take good images. I'd stand by my advice to learn how to take a good picture, then use whatever equipment and software you need to get the very best images.
Maybe I am a geezer (certainly am in Slashdot terms, having passed that fateful 11110 year) But I think post-production should be about making the best image/print, not about correcting sloppy exposure and composition. And so, once you've mastered those two aspects that every SLR user can control, you can hand off your print film to be developed and printed knowing that the printer is starting with good raw materials, rather than expecting the printer to fix your slop.
If you black out in the highlights in your neg., no printer in the world can salvage the detail. If you get no light into the shadows, no amount of dodging will bring them back. If you haven't learned how exposure works, you're not going to look at a scene, and say something like "there's a lot of blue sky in this shot, so the meter is probably gonna underexpose the foreground. I want some detail out of that little lawn gnome in the tree-shadow over there, and I don't care if the sky whites out a little. So I'm gonna go 1/3-2/3 stops over". Or something like "I want just that person, and not the ugly billboard fifty feet behind them. So I'm gonna open up to f/1.8 and shoot at 1/5000, rather than the f/8 that the meter's recomending. God forbid, I might even slap on a ND filter to get the lens wide open." Of course, if you've bought the 35-70 f/3.5-5.6 that the manufacturer included with your kit, you can't get that shot anyway:(
How does taking too MANY pictures hamper you from learning photography?
Simple-- people that are taking a hundred pictures aren't looking at them. They get one or two good ones, delete the rest, and pat themselves on the back. If they take twenty or thirty shots and then sit down and LOOK at them, they're going to do fine. But they may as well have done it on film.
Speaking of sitting down and looking at the shots, where exactly is our novice going to look at these unmodified raw digital images? On a multi-thousand dollar color corrected and calibrated monitor? I don't think so. They're probably not going to have a clue what the gamma or color temperature of their screen is at, or have any idea how to correct that to see the "raw" image they shot correctly.
Even if you do digital right, and learn all you want about composition, it's still gonna be really tough to learn about exposure, keeping your highlights and shadows from getting blown or blackened, on a digital.
Please don't listen to this guy - he's a film elitist.
That's funny, since today I shoot about ten times as much digital as film. Digital is great, once you've learned. My all time favorite shots, though, are landscapes I shot on kodachrome 64, and then had 20x24 cibachromes done. Simply incredible, no grain at all visible. If you wanted to print that at 300 dpi, you're gonna need a 43 megapixel camera. Just a bit out of my budget, personally. Maybe the NSA's got one, but I'll stick to my canon.
But if you buy at $16, then Darl announces that SCO actually owns South America and the stock price goes up to $26, when it's time to buy back the stock shares you need to pay $10 per share.
Which is why you cover your shorts with limit buys; this keeps you from getting your arse handed to you. Anybody who shorts without covering is playing a very, very dangerous game;). If you don't have enough cash on hand to cover your limits, you have no business playing shorts.
Digital is NOT the way to learn photography. It encourages you to take way too many pictures, and has way too much error correction built into the systems. Slide film is the only medium where no post-processing is applied to the film that was in the camera after development, so there's no correction for poor exposures. What you shoot is what you get.
If you want to learn how to shoot, cheaply, get a K1000 (old metal body, if you can find it), a good 50mm f/1.4 or f/1.8 lens (older SMC-Pentax lenses are incredible). If you have the budget, an older Canon or Nikon body will do as well.
Buy yourself 10-15 36 shot rolls of ISO 100 or ISO 50 SLIDE film, and find a decent place that will develop and mount the rolls for ~$5/roll. Preferably a place with a friendly and helpful staff. Come in during off-hours. If you're really serious, buy yourself a tank developer and a dark bag, and do it yourself.
Go out and shoot one (1) roll of film. Take a notebook along, and write down the exposure you used, as well as the suggested exposure (centered needle in the K1000) for every shot. Develop the film. Look at it, carefully, on a lightbox with a loupe. If you don't have a lightbox, hang around the developers shop long enough to look at your shots. Are they over or under? What does the composition look like. Is there detail left in the shadows & highlights? Look at it very carefully. Once you've figured out what went on, load up the second roll and repeat. By the time you finish up the 10th roll, several weeks later, you're gonna be a pretty good photographer. Then consider going to black and white film, which will force you to learn a lot more about how light works than you've ever noticed before.
Re: the digital rebel-- it's ~$1000k, with an 18-55 (35-70mm equiv) f/3.5-f5.6 zoom. That has got to be the worst possible lens to learn photography on. The zoom lens teaches you nothing about how focal length works, it just encourages you to stand in one spot and zoom until it looks right. The tiny aperature (compared to a f/1.8) severly restricts how you learn about light. And the fact that it's so gawd awefully difficult to operate in full-manual (I'm assuming it's no easier than on my elan 7e) means that you'll be sliding into full auto long before you know enough about exposure to understand what you're doing, or catch the computer when it sets a bad expo.
Learn the craft honestly, then go get the best lenses you can afford, and a decent body to hang them on. You'll be taking great shots within a few months.
I very much doubt that any version of iTunes for windows will "break" a Windows version of the ipod. These older ipods were labeled as mac-only, and a third party wrote a software fix to get them to talk to each other.
Apple built the hardware, labeled it as mac only. You hooked it up to a PC using somebody else's software. Why exactly should apple provide any support whatsoever to this problem? That's why companies provide specifications-- if your hardware doesn't meet specs, don't come running to them. Your PC doesn't meet the spec of being a Mac, so why complain?
Actually attempting to tokenize objective C in kernel space doesn't deserve discussion anywhere, *ergo*, I digress;-)
Alright, I'm getting really tired of the incessant incorrect use of ergo on/. after last week. Lay off!
Ergo means "therefore, hence" (Merriam-Webster online). That's a causative relationship. Saying:
X, ergo Y
Means Y (is, happened, caused by, is proven by) X. It's not a parenthetical, it doesn't mean "but". No.
The attempted discussion on tokenizing objective C in the kernel did not cause you to digress, it is your digression. So ergo doesn't work here. Try the old fashioned "but I digress".
The famous "cogito, ergo sum" means "I think, therefore I am" -or- My existance is proven by the fact that I think
Alright, done ranting. Let the offtopic mods fly;)
;) I doubt that Belkin's marketing folks will agree to put "Warning: This device will randomly re-route your HTTP requests to an ad server of our choosing" on their boxes.
I know for me, and a lot of people here, things like routers and other hardware are our tools of trade. As with any other profession/hobby/etc, we have to trust our tools. And what Belkin's done with this is make a tool that doesn't do what it's supposed to do, and doesn't really warn us ahead of time that it's going to do something unexpected. If a company will put behaviour like this into their stuff, what other expected faulting will they do without warning me?
After this, I'd no more buy another piece of Belkin equipment than I'd buy a power drill that randomly stopped working-- if I can't trust a tool to do what it's supposed to do, every time, it's worse than having no tool at all.
Yeah, that's my point-- I'm pretty well familiar with sampling, given it's my job. And a truly random 40,000 sample would be plenty to give you 95% conf. in a 1e8 population (actually, it'd give you well over 99% for a yes/no question, probably with a margin of 1-2% depending on where the responses landed). IF the sample was properly selected.
The technique is called random sampling, and it hasn't been applied here. This is a self-selecting (or at least voluntary response, they didn't indicate how they got their panelists), non-random sample, asking for information on behaviour that's widely believed to be illegal, or at least has the potential for negative consequences. The sample isn't just not representative of the population, it's virtually guarenteed to be exclusive of the population you're trying to extrapolate into.
And they didn't ask a question, they're continuously monitoring the computers of their voluntary panelists (stated in their press release). How may people with good MP3 collections do you know that'll let the RIAA install monitoring software? Thought so.
The study measures deletion of songs off users' hard drives, not pirated music only. I have an actual social conscience, and an aversion to lawsuits. Yet, I have several gigs of music on my harddrive. Every song on the machine is from a CD that I have stacked in my closet, from which I've ripped the song as per my court-approved fair use rights. On a regular basis, I space-shift those songs off the HD onto a memory card to listen to in flight. None of this is even a little illegal, despite the RIAAs telling me so.
I will, however, agree that there are, in fact, millions of rather naive users that probably believe the RIAA can see into their harddrives and will sue them any day now. Kinda sad, if you ask me.
Yeah, the sample size isn't the problem here, it's the fact that the population agreeing to be monitored by the music industry is, by definition, dramatically different from the population on the net as a whole.
It's as if the highway patrol had a voluntary program to install speed recorders/transmitters in your car, and got one in every 2500 drivers to agree to the installation-- they're going to get 0% compliance from drivers like me;) and close to 100% compliance from the drivers that putz down the road at 5mph under. The two populations are essentially independant, and any extrapolation is going to be dead wrong.
"NPD MusicWatch Digital information is collected continuously from the PCs of 40,000 volunteer online panelists, balanced to represent the online population of PC users"
So they've found 40,000 volunteers to "represent" the maybe 100,000,000 people on the web. So their ratio is 1 volunteer to 2500 people online. If ~400 people out of their 40,000 deleted all their music files, they can claim more than a million people in the overall population did.
My God, that has to be just about the WORST mis-use of statistics-- they're using a voluntary participation-based sample to extrapolate "illegal" behavior (at least, according to the RIAA) of the population they're studying. At a ratio of 1:2500. My intro to stats profs would have given them a solid F for this study. (shakes head)
Slashdot Mirror
"You cannot hold the President accountable for the actions of another individual abusing the power he has given them."
I'm not given to swearing on slashdot, but BULLSHIT. The president is the Chief of the Executive Branch of our government. He's responsible for what happens there. If someone abuses powers that he's granted them, then he's responsible for terminating that person, and seeing to it that all possible criminal prosecution is carried out.
" So it is ok for this administration to not do anything about preventing future terrorism attacks?"
No, but I think it'd be a great start for the current administration to make future attacks less likely, rather than more likely as they've done.
If the president wants to prevent future terrorist attacks, then he might try figuring out why people are attacking us, rather than simply throwing rocks at whatever moves. IMHO, the actions taken by the current administration have set the US back at least 100 years in our status and respectability in the international community, and have given a reason to hate us to millions of people who have been shown to be quite willing to give their lives up to inflict damage on those they hate. And you see this as making us more safe? Here's a clue-- if the people of the whole world of Islam hate us, a few of them are gonna inflict terrorist harm, no matter how hard we turn the screws on ourselves. Maybe, just maybe, if we tried to work with them, they might not want to blow us up in quite the same way they do now.
I somehow don't think complaining to the local DA (who's responsible for California law) is gonna have a heck of a lot to say about how the FBI conducts itself under Federal law. But if you wanna knock yourself out, please complain to Attorney General Ashcroft. I'm sure he'll pay plenty of attention to your concerns ;)
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Please. Here in San Diego, the FBI used Patriot Act subpoenas to investigate council members being bribed by strip-club owners as "potential terrorist links". Say goodbye to several of the amendments...
Um, sounds to me like they gave you several months of warning there. Pretty much any business offering "unlimited" anything will apply a "reasonable" limit. You can't go to an all you can eat buffet, take a nap in the booth and start eating again later, just never leaving the restaurant. You can't use your "unlimited minutues" cell phone continuously. These companies (like Shaw) don't fine you, or call the cops, or anything else, when you exceed their limit of reasonableness. They just decide to stop doing business with you. Their right, as a private company.
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If you were routing a significant amount of bandwidth back and forth over the cable (must have been to get booted), then they don't care whether you're running P2P or just shoving random bits. You're generating enough traffic to make your local segment problematic for the other cable users, and so they don't care that they've lost your business-- you're not a customer, you're a liability. They warned you, you continued, and then they cut you off. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
Are you suggesting that the ISP should, in order to stick to their "unlimited" adverts, let you saturate their segment with garbage and degrade service to other customers just because you can't be bothered to properly configure your routing? (Running an internal network was probably a violation of their TOS, as well).
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You forgot to add $500 to Perkin-Elmer for a PCR license ;)
"There are no changes in film/print quality to throw you off etc."
;), which is a process for making prints directly from a slide. The colors and quality of reproduction simply blows away anything you can print from a color negative on coated paper-- unfortunately, it's pretty expensive to make them, and most folks don't take the time. If you visit a museum with really incredible looking color prints on the walls, they're probably cibachrome prints.
That's exactly my point. When you shoot slide film, the final mounted slide is actually the piece film that was inside the camera when you took the shot. As long as it's developed according to manufacturer specs (not a problem if you're shooting modern E-6 process film) there's essentially no variation in the final product you get out. If you did a good job, the slide looks good. If you did a bad job, the slide looks bad. As far as the print looking different, I was talking about a cibachrome (renamed to Ilfochrome, but everybody still calls them cibas
A modern printing machine can do anything, from taking a great neg and making a crummy print, to making a mediocre print look pretty good. And if you're looking at your digital pics and want a "faithful" reproduction, you have to make sure the color temp and gamma of your monitor is corrected.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not shooting for film snobbery. A lot of really good digital pics get taken all the time. And plenty of great pics have been taken with 35-70 zooms. But if a person wants to learn, nothing's quite like a manual body, 50mm f/1.8 lens, and slide film. I don't start fires with a flint and steel, either. But I learned how, and now I can feel a lot more confident that if I have equipment (i.e. lighter) problems when I'm out camping, I know what to do and how to fix it. Just a personal thing, ya know.
"I believe the word for that sort of action would be `piracy'. At least that's what it would be called if it happened in the open seas, in international waters."
Actually, no, on the open seas that'd be called "salvage". When a vessel goes to anothers assistance in response to an SOS, and saves the lives of the crew, the rescuer gets pretty extensive salvage rights. See the Cornell law library on the subject. Kind of funny, that the grandparent was wrong, the plane can't be confiscated since salvage only applies on the seas. And then your example of how he's wrong is itself wrong, since salvage does apply on the open seas. Ah, slashdot.
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Film is definitly more expensive. But good slides on velvia.... Nice. If you've got a great shot, you should definitly save up for a ciba, as a 20x24 will run you about $100 to get printed. I've only done it once ;). Worth it, though.
It's all inorganic dyes, so if you keep it behind UV blocking glass it ought to last forever (well, not as long as an archival B&W, but close enough). If you're going to keep it behind glass, get the glossy, classic deluxe (the cheaper print on coated paper won't last as long. The deluxe is on polyesther film). They look totally different from a normal print. More like looking through a window.
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"I'm just saying that the 1 in 9 thing doesn't make sense. "
The reason it makes sense is that for the UN to have any relevance whatsoever, it needs all of the superpowers to participate. Superpowers don't like to give up sovereignty. And, being superpowers, it's kind of hard to force them. Without being able to veto anything they don't like, there's no way you'd get the US, or Russia, or China to participate. Just think of how much louder the Birchers (yes, all of you professing the "get out of the UN now!" do have an organization...) would yell if the UN could "force" resolutions on the US. It'd be over with in five minutes, the republicans would be crawling over each other to pass the "kill the UN" bill, and the dems would go along for fear of being wiped out in the next election. As soon as one of the military superpowers walks away from the table, the organization no longer has any relevance (excluding the various service arms of the UN like the WHO).
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"I have never enlarged past 8x10, and probably never will. MOST people won't enlarge beyond 8x10 so the MP race is meaningless."
If you get a good shot, you should try it sometime. I've got a really nice 16x20 black and white of a farmstead near my parent's place hanging on my wall. And a really cool 20x24 cibachrome. To do that at 300dpi, you'd need a 43MP camera. Don't have one of those...
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I totally agree that "post-shot" modifications are important and necessary. The ultimate goal for most people is to end up with something nice on paper, whether printed with a dichroic head or by a dye-sub printer. And even a perfectly exposed negative will benefit from some dodging or burning during printing. But the original poster wasn't asking about what equipment they needed to make the best images, they wanted to know how to learn to take good images. I'd stand by my advice to learn how to take a good picture, then use whatever equipment and software you need to get the very best images.
:(
Maybe I am a geezer (certainly am in Slashdot terms, having passed that fateful 11110 year) But I think post-production should be about making the best image/print, not about correcting sloppy exposure and composition. And so, once you've mastered those two aspects that every SLR user can control, you can hand off your print film to be developed and printed knowing that the printer is starting with good raw materials, rather than expecting the printer to fix your slop.
If you black out in the highlights in your neg., no printer in the world can salvage the detail. If you get no light into the shadows, no amount of dodging will bring them back. If you haven't learned how exposure works, you're not going to look at a scene, and say something like "there's a lot of blue sky in this shot, so the meter is probably gonna underexpose the foreground. I want some detail out of that little lawn gnome in the tree-shadow over there, and I don't care if the sky whites out a little. So I'm gonna go 1/3-2/3 stops over". Or something like "I want just that person, and not the ugly billboard fifty feet behind them. So I'm gonna open up to f/1.8 and shoot at 1/5000, rather than the f/8 that the meter's recomending. God forbid, I might even slap on a ND filter to get the lens wide open." Of course, if you've bought the 35-70 f/3.5-5.6 that the manufacturer included with your kit, you can't get that shot anyway
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How does taking too MANY pictures hamper you from learning photography?
Simple-- people that are taking a hundred pictures aren't looking at them. They get one or two good ones, delete the rest, and pat themselves on the back. If they take twenty or thirty shots and then sit down and LOOK at them, they're going to do fine. But they may as well have done it on film.
Speaking of sitting down and looking at the shots, where exactly is our novice going to look at these unmodified raw digital images? On a multi-thousand dollar color corrected and calibrated monitor? I don't think so. They're probably not going to have a clue what the gamma or color temperature of their screen is at, or have any idea how to correct that to see the "raw" image they shot correctly.
Even if you do digital right, and learn all you want about composition, it's still gonna be really tough to learn about exposure, keeping your highlights and shadows from getting blown or blackened, on a digital.
Please don't listen to this guy - he's a film elitist.
That's funny, since today I shoot about ten times as much digital as film. Digital is great, once you've learned. My all time favorite shots, though, are landscapes I shot on kodachrome 64, and then had 20x24 cibachromes done. Simply incredible, no grain at all visible. If you wanted to print that at 300 dpi, you're gonna need a 43 megapixel camera. Just a bit out of my budget, personally. Maybe the NSA's got one, but I'll stick to my canon.
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Which is why you cover your shorts with limit buys; this keeps you from getting your arse handed to you. Anybody who shorts without covering is playing a very, very dangerous game
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Digital is NOT the way to learn photography. It encourages you to take way too many pictures, and has way too much error correction built into the systems. Slide film is the only medium where no post-processing is applied to the film that was in the camera after development, so there's no correction for poor exposures. What you shoot is what you get.
If you want to learn how to shoot, cheaply, get a K1000 (old metal body, if you can find it), a good 50mm f/1.4 or f/1.8 lens (older SMC-Pentax lenses are incredible). If you have the budget, an older Canon or Nikon body will do as well.
Buy yourself 10-15 36 shot rolls of ISO 100 or ISO 50 SLIDE film, and find a decent place that will develop and mount the rolls for ~$5/roll. Preferably a place with a friendly and helpful staff. Come in during off-hours. If you're really serious, buy yourself a tank developer and a dark bag, and do it yourself.
Go out and shoot one (1) roll of film. Take a notebook along, and write down the exposure you used, as well as the suggested exposure (centered needle in the K1000) for every shot. Develop the film. Look at it, carefully, on a lightbox with a loupe. If you don't have a lightbox, hang around the developers shop long enough to look at your shots. Are they over or under? What does the composition look like. Is there detail left in the shadows & highlights? Look at it very carefully. Once you've figured out what went on, load up the second roll and repeat. By the time you finish up the 10th roll, several weeks later, you're gonna be a pretty good photographer. Then consider going to black and white film, which will force you to learn a lot more about how light works than you've ever noticed before.
Re: the digital rebel-- it's ~$1000k, with an 18-55 (35-70mm equiv) f/3.5-f5.6 zoom. That has got to be the worst possible lens to learn photography on. The zoom lens teaches you nothing about how focal length works, it just encourages you to stand in one spot and zoom until it looks right. The tiny aperature (compared to a f/1.8) severly restricts how you learn about light. And the fact that it's so gawd awefully difficult to operate in full-manual (I'm assuming it's no easier than on my elan 7e) means that you'll be sliding into full auto long before you know enough about exposure to understand what you're doing, or catch the computer when it sets a bad expo.
Learn the craft honestly, then go get the best lenses you can afford, and a decent body to hang them on. You'll be taking great shots within a few months.
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Yes.
This is
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Obviously you live in LA...
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I very much doubt that any version of iTunes for windows will "break" a Windows version of the ipod. These older ipods were labeled as mac-only, and a third party wrote a software fix to get them to talk to each other.
Apple built the hardware, labeled it as mac only. You hooked it up to a PC using somebody else's software. Why exactly should apple provide any support whatsoever to this problem? That's why companies provide specifications-- if your hardware doesn't meet specs, don't come running to them. Your PC doesn't meet the spec of being a Mac, so why complain?
Alright, I'm getting really tired of the incessant incorrect use of ergo on
Ergo means "therefore, hence" (Merriam-Webster online). That's a causative relationship. Saying:
X, ergo Y
Means Y (is, happened, caused by, is proven by) X. It's not a parenthetical, it doesn't mean "but". No.
The attempted discussion on tokenizing objective C in the kernel did not cause you to digress, it is your digression. So ergo doesn't work here. Try the old fashioned "but I digress".
The famous "cogito, ergo sum"
means
"I think, therefore I am"
-or-
My existance is proven by the fact that I think
Alright, done ranting. Let the offtopic mods fly
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;) I doubt that Belkin's marketing folks will agree to put "Warning: This device will randomly re-route your HTTP requests to an ad server of our choosing" on their boxes.
Oh well, no loss for me. Love ya, D-link!
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I know for me, and a lot of people here, things like routers and other hardware are our tools of trade. As with any other profession/hobby/etc, we have to trust our tools. And what Belkin's done with this is make a tool that doesn't do what it's supposed to do, and doesn't really warn us ahead of time that it's going to do something unexpected. If a company will put behaviour like this into their stuff, what other expected faulting will they do without warning me?
After this, I'd no more buy another piece of Belkin equipment than I'd buy a power drill that randomly stopped working-- if I can't trust a tool to do what it's supposed to do, every time, it's worse than having no tool at all.
Yeah, that's my point-- I'm pretty well familiar with sampling, given it's my job. And a truly random 40,000 sample would be plenty to give you 95% conf. in a 1e8 population (actually, it'd give you well over 99% for a yes/no question, probably with a margin of 1-2% depending on where the responses landed). IF the sample was properly selected.
The technique is called random sampling, and it hasn't been applied here. This is a self-selecting (or at least voluntary response, they didn't indicate how they got their panelists), non-random sample, asking for information on behaviour that's widely believed to be illegal, or at least has the potential for negative consequences. The sample isn't just not representative of the population, it's virtually guarenteed to be exclusive of the population you're trying to extrapolate into.
And they didn't ask a question, they're continuously monitoring the computers of their voluntary panelists (stated in their press release). How may people with good MP3 collections do you know that'll let the RIAA install monitoring software? Thought so.
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The study measures deletion of songs off users' hard drives, not pirated music only. I have an actual social conscience, and an aversion to lawsuits. Yet, I have several gigs of music on my harddrive. Every song on the machine is from a CD that I have stacked in my closet, from which I've ripped the song as per my court-approved fair use rights. On a regular basis, I space-shift those songs off the HD onto a memory card to listen to in flight. None of this is even a little illegal, despite the RIAAs telling me so.
I will, however, agree that there are, in fact, millions of rather naive users that probably believe the RIAA can see into their harddrives and will sue them any day now. Kinda sad, if you ask me.
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Yeah, the sample size isn't the problem here, it's the fact that the population agreeing to be monitored by the music industry is, by definition, dramatically different from the population on the net as a whole.
;) and close to 100% compliance from the drivers that putz down the road at 5mph under. The two populations are essentially independant, and any extrapolation is going to be dead wrong.
It's as if the highway patrol had a voluntary program to install speed recorders/transmitters in your car, and got one in every 2500 drivers to agree to the installation-- they're going to get 0% compliance from drivers like me
From their press release:
"NPD MusicWatch Digital information is collected continuously from the PCs of 40,000 volunteer online panelists, balanced to represent the online population of PC users"
So they've found 40,000 volunteers to "represent" the maybe 100,000,000 people on the web. So their ratio is 1 volunteer to 2500 people online. If ~400 people out of their 40,000 deleted all their music files, they can claim more than a million people in the overall population did.
My God, that has to be just about the WORST mis-use of statistics-- they're using a voluntary participation-based sample to extrapolate "illegal" behavior (at least, according to the RIAA) of the population they're studying. At a ratio of 1:2500. My intro to stats profs would have given them a solid F for this study. (shakes head)