Want a shallow depth of field? Think you need a large lens / fast lens? Why? When the computer can take multiple photos at different focal lengths and calculate the depth properly. Why twiddle with zoom and f-stop?
Because by the time my camera gets around to taking several photos at various focal lengths, the fast moving subject I was trying to take a picture of already left the scene. But I have the opposite problem (since I can fake a shallow depth of field in photoshop) -- I have to open the lens all the way on my P&S in any kind of low-light situation since the sensor is too noisy at high ISO's, so I end up with a shallower depth of field than I wanted.
Want a fast lens? Point and shoots go down to f1.8 now. I can photograph the craters on the moon with a pocket sized G7X without a tripod FFS. How often do you try to detect planets in other solar systems?
I want a fast lens *and* a larger, lower noise sensor than I can find in most P&S cameras. But I don't use that fast lens for taking pictures of planets or the moon.
Want to shoot wildlife at a distance? Think your DSLR is the best option? Think again, you should be using a higher pixel camera at a lower zoom, because you'll have difficulty tracking the moving object at high zoom with that lumping great lens.
Right, all those sports photographers that use the big $8000+ 300mm telephoto lenses could save some money and just get a point a shoot with more pixels than his 20MP DSLR and he can just crop down the pictures to give him a nice 3MP shot of the winning touchdown. Pixels are pixels, right? The 1/2" sensor on a 20MP point-and-shoot is just as good as the 35mm sensor on his DSLR, right? And what possible difference could there be between an $8000 lens and the lens on a $500 P&S?
Want to shoot movies? Do you see any pros using DSLRs? They use a Red or similar, not a Canon EOS.
Here's a list of 30 movies and TV shows that have been shot in whole or part on Canon or Nikon DSLRs:
Don't you all already badges or dongles or something along those lines?
Hard to get any faster and more convenient than this -- if they don't want to make employees scan their badges, put an RFID reader in the chair and keep the badge in the back pocket and it's automatic and instant every time they sit down at a workstation.
Unless they have a specific need for biometrics, there's no point in using it.
unlocking car boots, setting off windscreen wipers, locking brakes, and cutting the engine.
If a hacker can do all that, why can't the car itself open the windows slightly if the temperature inside gets high and there is no rain outside? All the hardware is already there — the sensors know both the inside temperature and whether anything is hitting the windshield (so wipers can turn automatically in rain).
Would've made returning to your car in the sunny lot more comfortable and even saved some lives.
Because opening the windows slightly only affects inside temperatures slightly? Yet it makes it much easier to thread in a wire to snag a door handle to open the door.
A forced air fan to vent in cooler air from below the car 30 minutes before you return to the car would be more effective. And the only thing stopping that is cost vs benefit - not enough people would find it useful enough to add $xx to the price of the car.
I'm a cyclist. So I can safely say, that serious cyclist spending $5k+ on a bike are doing so for weight. Those are the same people who spend $100 for a carbon bottle cage that weighs only a few grams less than a $5 plastic or metal cage.
I'm a cyclist too, so I can safely say, that most cyclists spending $5K on a bike are doing so for appearance only, because if they lost just a few pounds of the extra weight they are carrying, it would save more money than the upgrade from a $2500 to a $5000 bike. I had a 250 lb friend who actually drilled out various components on his bike to save a few grams of weight. It wasn't until he snapped off his drilled out chainring that he realized that maybe the manufacturer already cut out as much weight as they could.
They will most likely never purchase something like this for any serious use. Those that do, are those who have more money than sense, and buy expensive bikes so they can ride down the trail at 5mph on their expensive bikes in their expensive clothing blocking the paths looking like a cyclist.
I'd never purchase something like this for serious use because if I'm going to be biking far from reliable water supplies, I don't want to count on a mechanical device to extract water for me. On long unsupported rides, I carry some water purification tablets just in case, but haven't had to use them yet, rural fire stations and post offices are a good source of water.
The AJC article mentioned the weight and the rough ride. I'd guess that yet another disadvantage of a wooden bicycle, at least when sharing the road with motor vehicles, is that it's impossible to trigger a green traffic signal without enough metal surface to disturb the flux in the induction loop beneath the approach to the intersection. At some intersections, even a metal bicycle has a problem with that.
While an all wooden bike (including wheels)might have problems tripping lights, I almost always can trip the lights with my Carbon Fiber bike with aluminum wheels, I just have to careful where I stop. I don't think an all-wooden bike (including wooden wheels) would be practical enough for much riding around town - the road vibrations noted in the article would make long rides unpleasant.
how can one verify that this future "certificate authority that issues free certificates to any website" hasn't issued a cert to the NSA for your domain? is it possible?
How can one verify that any "certificate authority" hasn't issued a cert to the NSA?
But if your domain is currently running HTTP because you don't want to pay for an HTTPS certificate, giving the NSA a backdoor to decrypt your website doesn't seem like much of a drawback. Not that matter for most people, if the NSA wants to see your data, if they can't get it from you, they'll get it from your ISP.
One single UPS can cover multiple racks without excessive conversion losses. Putting an individual UPS and a bank of batteries per rack is just plain stupid. Instead of maintaining few large units, you are now maintaining multiple small units. You are now more likely to have an unanticipated failure should the power go out.
They already mentioned that in the article.... It's better to lose power to a few racks than lose power to 100 racks when your main UPS fails. Your use case may be different but you are not Facebook.
Why? What do you think is within the reach of human beings in space that is not available on Earth? A reply containing the words "wonder", "exploration" or "adventure" are not acceptable.
Redundancy. There are lots of potential disasters that could wipe out life on earth. Most (but not all) of them are remediated by having humans on another planet.
Even with a self-sustained colony on Mars the odds of humanity being wiped out by a natural disaster (asteroid, etc) aren't significantly improved over all of humanity on a single planet. Without a full ecosystem a Martian colony would eventually die out, likely long before they were able to build their own means to spread to other planets.
Isn't that the point of sending people to mars? To build infrastructure to allow more people to arrive?
Granted, 6 people living in a tiny habitate on mars aren't going to recolonize Earth even if they had the means to come back, but a colony of 100,000 might. Such a large colony may be decades (centuries?) in the future, but until the first people arrive, there will continue to be zero people on mars -- someone has to be first.
Partly this is due to the internet which allows people to schedule themselves more efficiently, making few trips.
Do you have a reference for this? I find that I can schedule very little with the internet that reduces my trips. The thing that the internet does for me that helps reduce trips is online purchases -- except for groceries, most of my purchases are made online so I almost never go to the mall or big-box store. Previously I might have had to make more than one trip to different stored to find what I'm looking for.
I could get groceries delivered, but I don't find it to be more convenient than doing it myself since I don't find browsing for groceries in a web interface to be a good substitute for actually looking at the food (particularly with meat and produce) and if I have to schedule a window of time to be home anyway, I might as well just go myself rather than arranging to be home from 6pm-9pm.
But scheduling? There's not much in my daily life that I can schedule over the internet that I couldn't have already scheduled over the phone (like restaurant reservations and hair cut appointments) - and many of those still don't accept internet reservations.
http://www.newapproachwa.org/sites/newapproachwa.org/files/I-502%20Factsheet%20-%20DUI.pdf (if you don't like to link directly to pdfs then do the internet search yourself you lazy pot-head).
Interesting accusation coming from the guy that's too lazy to use the tags to turn his link into a proper HTML link.
This is already being tested in the courts. There's not yet (as far as I know) a test for marijuana intoxication, only detection that you've used marjuana at some point in the past few days/weeks, so there's little justification for testing for marijuana when it's already legal for recreational and/or medicinal use. It's particularly controversial when an employee uses marijuana medicinally -- cough medicine is going to affect employee performance much more than smoking pot over the weekend.
I wish governments would use taxes to pay for benefits for the poor instead of making us pay through hidden costs by forcing companies to give "free" or reduced cost services, which are made up for in higher fees for the service. The same goes for "affordable housing" where developers have to provide reduced cost housing, which is paid for in higher cost of housing for everyone else.
I have no problem with providing benefits, but If governments want to provide these benefits, then provide them through taxes where they are shared among all taxpayers (why should a Comcast customer pay to subsidize "free" interenet for the poor, while an AT&T UVerse customer does not?), everyone can see what they are paying to the full cost of providing these benefits is known, and the local taxes are tax deductible themselves.
Most likely, the suspect used MySpace at an anonymous IP that wouldn't connect him. I expect that the IP address would not give them as deep data as to the identity of the specific user as the CIPAV would.
So you're saying he checked his MySpace email using an anonymous address, but clicked on links in his MySpace email using his own IP address?
If the FBI knew he had a Myspace account and had his MySpace ID (since, after all, they emailed him there), why didn't they just ask MySpace (and by "ask", I mean "force them to hand it over with no recourse to question the 'request'") to hand over IP address?
But I tell you what. Since arsenic occurs in small amounts in many water sources, I'm going to give you a gallon of it to drink, because your logic indicates that should be perfectly alright.
Don't fall for this trap -- Arsenic is a solid at room temperature, if he gives you a gallon to drink, then it's around 1500 degF, and if you drink it, you'll die of massive burns before the Arsenic has a chance to kill you.
Set her up with Wifi calling and a small data/minutes SIM from T-Mobile for next to no cost to get her through the times when she is not at home with Wifi. Sounds like she's mostly at home, so take care of 90% of the needs with home internet + Wifi and then have a small $15/mo plan for when she's not at home.
Ahh, so then it's not just $15/extra, that's $30 extra -- $15 for the home internet plus $15 (or more?) for a 300 minute cell phone plan... so that puts him 50% higher than he budgeted.
Cricket prepaid is $60 for 10GB of high speed data with fallback to slow speeds if you exceed it (so she can still email you, but can't watch video). You can choose to pay $10/GB for extra data.
If they let me set up a prepaid account instead of debiting from my checking account, I might use it.
But only if it works so well that I don't need to carry a credit card. I really wanted to like Google Wallet but it's been too unreliable to count on - out of a dozen or so attempts to use it, 3 were unable to be completed. Once no matter how much I swiped my phone, the merchant's terminal wouldn't register the payment - after a half dozen emails with Google support, I finally deleted my wallet and re-added it and that solved the problem. Then, on two separate occasions I was unable to make a payment when the app complained about being unable to connect to the internet after I entered my PIN. The worst problem I've experienced with my credit card is having to swipe again when the first swipe doesn't work.
If I have to carry a credit card as backup anyway (and have it ready to go when the phone fails to pay), I may as well just swipe the card in the first place. All of the merchants where I'm able to use Google Wallet also allow no-signature transactions for small amounts, so it's actually more convenient than unlocking my phone to make a payment. I wish the USA's banking system would move into the modern century with contactless chip-and-pin cards.
>According to BMW their so-called "security" is so secured that there are BILLIONS of combination in their "secure key" system
Well there's the problem right there - obviously they didn't take computer security seriously or they'd realize that billions of combinations hardly gives a brute-force hacking simpleton time tor their coffee to cool - I don't think anyone has considered 32 bit encryption keys secure since... ever, really.
Given that physical keys can have only "thousands" of combinations and provide reasonable security (car thiefs will break the window rather than try to pick the lock), you don't need a bit 128 digital key to make a secure car door lock, you just need to rate-limit brute force attacks. no thief can spend the time testing thousands of physical keys in the lock door lock, and if the system stops listening for 5 minutes every N number of incorrect keys, then even a 32 bit digital key can be immune to a brute force attack (though the protocol has to protect against snooping)
And that's assuming there's no vulnerabilities in the system. Meanwhile in order for the mechanic to be able to replace a lost key you need to install a gaping back door in every car you make, rendering your security system irrelevant except to the most casual of thieves.
It needn't be a big gaping back door -- if every new car-key generation request has to be signed by the secure private key only known by the manufacturer, then stolen car-key programming equipment has a very short lifetime - it's only good until the equipment is reported stolen, and only validated service stations can get their car-key requests signed and it's trivial to track stolen cars back to the machine that generated the key.
I doubt it took any pressure from any single vendor since lacking PCI certification locked them out of a lot of potential customers.
Why do you say it's a pity? Is having security controls and processes validated by a third party auditor somehow a bad thing? Regardless of what you think of the PCI DSS, having an auditor validate security sounds like a good thing.
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Want a shallow depth of field? Think you need a large lens / fast lens? Why? When the computer can take multiple photos at different focal lengths and calculate the depth properly. Why twiddle with zoom and f-stop?
Because by the time my camera gets around to taking several photos at various focal lengths, the fast moving subject I was trying to take a picture of already left the scene. But I have the opposite problem (since I can fake a shallow depth of field in photoshop) -- I have to open the lens all the way on my P&S in any kind of low-light situation since the sensor is too noisy at high ISO's, so I end up with a shallower depth of field than I wanted.
Want a fast lens? Point and shoots go down to f1.8 now. I can photograph the craters on the moon with a pocket sized G7X without a tripod FFS. How often do you try to detect planets in other solar systems?
I want a fast lens *and* a larger, lower noise sensor than I can find in most P&S cameras. But I don't use that fast lens for taking pictures of planets or the moon.
Want to shoot wildlife at a distance? Think your DSLR is the best option? Think again, you should be using a higher pixel camera at a lower zoom, because you'll have difficulty tracking the moving object at high zoom with that lumping great lens.
Right, all those sports photographers that use the big $8000+ 300mm telephoto lenses could save some money and just get a point a shoot with more pixels than his 20MP DSLR and he can just crop down the pictures to give him a nice 3MP shot of the winning touchdown. Pixels are pixels, right? The 1/2" sensor on a 20MP point-and-shoot is just as good as the 35mm sensor on his DSLR, right? And what possible difference could there be between an $8000 lens and the lens on a $500 P&S?
Want to shoot movies? Do you see any pros using DSLRs? They use a Red or similar, not a Canon EOS.
Here's a list of 30 movies and TV shows that have been shot in whole or part on Canon or Nikon DSLRs:
http://www.imdb.com/list/ls059...
Don't you all already badges or dongles or something along those lines?
Hard to get any faster and more convenient than this -- if they don't want to make employees scan their badges, put an RFID reader in the chair and keep the badge in the back pocket and it's automatic and instant every time they sit down at a workstation.
Unless they have a specific need for biometrics, there's no point in using it.
I saw some video about hand scanner that uses your vein mapping. This is good because you dont need to touch it, and it'd be hard to replicate.
But does it work through gloves?
If a hacker can do all that, why can't the car itself open the windows slightly if the temperature inside gets high and there is no rain outside? All the hardware is already there — the sensors know both the inside temperature and whether anything is hitting the windshield (so wipers can turn automatically in rain).
Would've made returning to your car in the sunny lot more comfortable and even saved some lives.
Because opening the windows slightly only affects inside temperatures slightly? Yet it makes it much easier to thread in a wire to snag a door handle to open the door.
A forced air fan to vent in cooler air from below the car 30 minutes before you return to the car would be more effective. And the only thing stopping that is cost vs benefit - not enough people would find it useful enough to add $xx to the price of the car.
They spend $200M/year on software development -- have browsers become so complicated that Mozilla and associated projects need 1000+ developers?
I'm a cyclist. So I can safely say, that serious cyclist spending $5k+ on a bike are doing so for weight. Those are the same people who spend $100 for a carbon bottle cage that weighs only a few grams less than a $5 plastic or metal cage.
I'm a cyclist too, so I can safely say, that most cyclists spending $5K on a bike are doing so for appearance only, because if they lost just a few pounds of the extra weight they are carrying, it would save more money than the upgrade from a $2500 to a $5000 bike. I had a 250 lb friend who actually drilled out various components on his bike to save a few grams of weight. It wasn't until he snapped off his drilled out chainring that he realized that maybe the manufacturer already cut out as much weight as they could.
They will most likely never purchase something like this for any serious use. Those that do, are those who have more money than sense, and buy expensive bikes so they can ride down the trail at 5mph on their expensive bikes in their expensive clothing blocking the paths looking like a cyclist.
I'd never purchase something like this for serious use because if I'm going to be biking far from reliable water supplies, I don't want to count on a mechanical device to extract water for me. On long unsupported rides, I carry some water purification tablets just in case, but haven't had to use them yet, rural fire stations and post offices are a good source of water.
The AJC article mentioned the weight and the rough ride. I'd guess that yet another disadvantage of a wooden bicycle, at least when sharing the road with motor vehicles, is that it's impossible to trigger a green traffic signal without enough metal surface to disturb the flux in the induction loop beneath the approach to the intersection. At some intersections, even a metal bicycle has a problem with that.
While an all wooden bike (including wheels)might have problems tripping lights, I almost always can trip the lights with my Carbon Fiber bike with aluminum wheels, I just have to careful where I stop. I don't think an all-wooden bike (including wooden wheels) would be practical enough for much riding around town - the road vibrations noted in the article would make long rides unpleasant.
how can one verify that this future "certificate authority that issues free certificates to any website" hasn't issued a cert to the NSA for your domain? is it possible?
How can one verify that any "certificate authority" hasn't issued a cert to the NSA?
But if your domain is currently running HTTP because you don't want to pay for an HTTPS certificate, giving the NSA a backdoor to decrypt your website doesn't seem like much of a drawback. Not that matter for most people, if the NSA wants to see your data, if they can't get it from you, they'll get it from your ISP.
One single UPS can cover multiple racks without excessive conversion losses. Putting an individual UPS and a bank of batteries per rack is just plain stupid. Instead of maintaining few large units, you are now maintaining multiple small units. You are now more likely to have an unanticipated failure should the power go out.
They already mentioned that in the article.... It's better to lose power to a few racks than lose power to 100 racks when your main UPS fails. Your use case may be different but you are not Facebook.
Why? What do you think is within the reach of human beings in space that is not available on Earth? A reply containing the words "wonder", "exploration" or "adventure" are not acceptable.
Redundancy. There are lots of potential disasters that could wipe out life on earth. Most (but not all) of them are remediated by having humans on another planet.
Even with a self-sustained colony on Mars the odds of humanity being wiped out by a natural disaster (asteroid, etc) aren't significantly improved over all of humanity on a single planet. Without a full ecosystem a Martian colony would eventually die out, likely long before they were able to build their own means to spread to other planets.
Isn't that the point of sending people to mars? To build infrastructure to allow more people to arrive?
Granted, 6 people living in a tiny habitate on mars aren't going to recolonize Earth even if they had the means to come back, but a colony of 100,000 might. Such a large colony may be decades (centuries?) in the future, but until the first people arrive, there will continue to be zero people on mars -- someone has to be first.
Partly this is due to the internet which allows people to schedule themselves more efficiently, making few trips.
Do you have a reference for this? I find that I can schedule very little with the internet that reduces my trips. The thing that the internet does for me that helps reduce trips is online purchases -- except for groceries, most of my purchases are made online so I almost never go to the mall or big-box store. Previously I might have had to make more than one trip to different stored to find what I'm looking for.
I could get groceries delivered, but I don't find it to be more convenient than doing it myself since I don't find browsing for groceries in a web interface to be a good substitute for actually looking at the food (particularly with meat and produce) and if I have to schedule a window of time to be home anyway, I might as well just go myself rather than arranging to be home from 6pm-9pm.
But scheduling? There's not much in my daily life that I can schedule over the internet that I couldn't have already scheduled over the phone (like restaurant reservations and hair cut appointments) - and many of those still don't accept internet reservations.
And people ask me why I wouldn't wanna work in the US if they paid 10 times my salary...
Because smoking cigarettes is worth 10X your salary?
http://www.newapproachwa.org/sites/newapproachwa.org/files/I-502%20Factsheet%20-%20DUI.pdf (if you don't like to link directly to pdfs then do the internet search yourself you lazy pot-head).
Interesting accusation coming from the guy that's too lazy to use the tags to turn his link into a proper HTML link.
Also remember many jobs will drug test you.
This is already being tested in the courts. There's not yet (as far as I know) a test for marijuana intoxication, only detection that you've used marjuana at some point in the past few days/weeks, so there's little justification for testing for marijuana when it's already legal for recreational and/or medicinal use. It's particularly controversial when an employee uses marijuana medicinally -- cough medicine is going to affect employee performance much more than smoking pot over the weekend.
I wish governments would use taxes to pay for benefits for the poor instead of making us pay through hidden costs by forcing companies to give "free" or reduced cost services, which are made up for in higher fees for the service. The same goes for "affordable housing" where developers have to provide reduced cost housing, which is paid for in higher cost of housing for everyone else.
I have no problem with providing benefits, but If governments want to provide these benefits, then provide them through taxes where they are shared among all taxpayers (why should a Comcast customer pay to subsidize "free" interenet for the poor, while an AT&T UVerse customer does not?), everyone can see what they are paying to the full cost of providing these benefits is known, and the local taxes are tax deductible themselves.
I would be impressed if it didn't require a malicious payload on the target computer.
Because it's so hard to get a malicious payload onto a computer? Especially one that you have physical access to?
Most likely, the suspect used MySpace at an anonymous IP that wouldn't connect him. I expect that the IP address would not give them as deep data as to the identity of the specific user as the CIPAV would.
So you're saying he checked his MySpace email using an anonymous address, but clicked on links in his MySpace email using his own IP address?
If the FBI knew he had a Myspace account and had his MySpace ID (since, after all, they emailed him there), why didn't they just ask MySpace (and by "ask", I mean "force them to hand it over with no recourse to question the 'request'") to hand over IP address?
But I tell you what. Since arsenic occurs in small amounts in many water sources, I'm going to give you a gallon of it to drink, because your logic indicates that should be perfectly alright.
Don't fall for this trap -- Arsenic is a solid at room temperature, if he gives you a gallon to drink, then it's around 1500 degF, and if you drink it, you'll die of massive burns before the Arsenic has a chance to kill you.
Set her up with Wifi calling and a small data/minutes SIM from T-Mobile for next to no cost to get her through the times when she is not at home with Wifi. Sounds like she's mostly at home, so take care of 90% of the needs with home internet + Wifi and then have a small $15/mo plan for when she's not at home.
Ahh, so then it's not just $15/extra, that's $30 extra -- $15 for the home internet plus $15 (or more?) for a 300 minute cell phone plan... so that puts him 50% higher than he budgeted.
...than the $65 you already stated you are willing to spend to get her internet in her room.
Enough said.
But then he's still got to pay for some cell phone plan for her since presumably she wants to be able to use her phone away from home.
1GB in 3 days is around 10GB/month.
Cricket prepaid is $60 for 10GB of high speed data with fallback to slow speeds if you exceed it (so she can still email you, but can't watch video). You can choose to pay $10/GB for extra data.
If they let me set up a prepaid account instead of debiting from my checking account, I might use it.
But only if it works so well that I don't need to carry a credit card. I really wanted to like Google Wallet but it's been too unreliable to count on - out of a dozen or so attempts to use it, 3 were unable to be completed. Once no matter how much I swiped my phone, the merchant's terminal wouldn't register the payment - after a half dozen emails with Google support, I finally deleted my wallet and re-added it and that solved the problem. Then, on two separate occasions I was unable to make a payment when the app complained about being unable to connect to the internet after I entered my PIN. The worst problem I've experienced with my credit card is having to swipe again when the first swipe doesn't work.
If I have to carry a credit card as backup anyway (and have it ready to go when the phone fails to pay), I may as well just swipe the card in the first place. All of the merchants where I'm able to use Google Wallet also allow no-signature transactions for small amounts, so it's actually more convenient than unlocking my phone to make a payment. I wish the USA's banking system would move into the modern century with contactless chip-and-pin cards.
>According to BMW their so-called "security" is so secured that there are BILLIONS of combination in their "secure key" system
Well there's the problem right there - obviously they didn't take computer security seriously or they'd realize that billions of combinations hardly gives a brute-force hacking simpleton time tor their coffee to cool - I don't think anyone has considered 32 bit encryption keys secure since... ever, really.
Given that physical keys can have only "thousands" of combinations and provide reasonable security (car thiefs will break the window rather than try to pick the lock), you don't need a bit 128 digital key to make a secure car door lock, you just need to rate-limit brute force attacks. no thief can spend the time testing thousands of physical keys in the lock door lock, and if the system stops listening for 5 minutes every N number of incorrect keys, then even a 32 bit digital key can be immune to a brute force attack (though the protocol has to protect against snooping)
And that's assuming there's no vulnerabilities in the system. Meanwhile in order for the mechanic to be able to replace a lost key you need to install a gaping back door in every car you make, rendering your security system irrelevant except to the most casual of thieves.
It needn't be a big gaping back door -- if every new car-key generation request has to be signed by the secure private key only known by the manufacturer, then stolen car-key programming equipment has a very short lifetime - it's only good until the equipment is reported stolen, and only validated service stations can get their car-key requests signed and it's trivial to track stolen cars back to the machine that generated the key.
So they have managed that now? A pity. I wonder how much pressure was applied and how much money paid to get that.
If by "now", you mean 4 years ago, yeah, AWS managed it.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/a...
I doubt it took any pressure from any single vendor since lacking PCI certification locked them out of a lot of potential customers.
Why do you say it's a pity? Is having security controls and processes validated by a third party auditor somehow a bad thing? Regardless of what you think of the PCI DSS, having an auditor validate security sounds like a good thing.