I shoot digital only so don't really have any experience with film, but was there actually anything about Kodachrome that made it unique (in a good way) and will have anyone mourning its demise (other than Paul Simon), or are the newer films universally better?
I've thought about borrowing my dad's OM-1 just to shoot a few rolls of Velvia, but have never gotten around to it. (I have a few OM-mount lenses that I use on digital.)
Everything you said made sense up until the last paragraph, and in principle it's true -- the military would be unlikely to act in open warfare against the citizens. But the military's not what you have to worry about; it's the police.
More relevantly to the American political situation, we have this nice divide between people authorized to use force against Americans (the police) and people authorized to use force against everyone else (the military). In between them we have the National Guard.
We're in a situation right now where even the police can out-shoot anything short of a mass rebellion willing to take enormous casualties, and THEY, unlike the military, aren't shy about using force against the American people -- after all, it's their job.
So, what happens when a bunch of civilians make a mass protest? They get the riot police. Now they're in a wonderfully bad PR situation: the riot police have all sorts of nonlethal weapons that won't cause an outcry if they're used, but the protesters don't have anything like that: it's bullets or nothing.
So the protesters shoot back against the microwave pain rays and tear gas and LRADs (and batons), and the National Guard gets called in. The protesters look bad, since they're the ones who went to lethal force first (since it's all they've got), and the Nat'l Guard is highly unlikely to sympathize with them.
Now, d'you think the military is going to turn on the Guard? Unlikely.
The military's irrelevant to the discussion: whether they will serve as a check on themselves doesn't matter, since it's the police that are likely to be the problem, and THEY won't.
That's because there's a plurality of moderate and/or left news sources out there, while Fox News has a monopoly on far-right television news.
Also, I imagine that moderates and liberals are more likely to not watch TV news in the first place. I'm basically a moderate, and I get most of my news from the Internet (predominantly, BBC News).
I don't think you'll find anything nearly as over-the-top as Glenn Beck on MSNBC. The most over-the-top thing I've seen there is Keith Olbermann sitting in a chair and reading his strongly-written (and articulately-written, for that matter) opinion pieces.
As far as whose message is "basically right", well, isn't that a little arrogant?
And you can't compare television ratings as a way of measuring poli-penises. American righties pretty much all watch Fox News, while more and more liberals and moderates are eschewing television news completely for things like BBC News, the Economist, etc.
Unfortunately the idea of literacy tests to vote (which is a good idea, IMO) was forever ruined by the idiot Southerners who used it as a racist measure (if you're an idiot and black you can't vote, but if you're an idiot and white then that's okay, since your grandpa could vote).
Then we need to fix the political system, which is a far bigger problem than how to send bits over wires. If we can't send in a bill about net neutrality without getting something out about kickbacks to Iowa corn farmers (or whatever), then we have a hell of a problem.
Congress suffers from the same problem. Look at the Patriot Act. Or, maybe, this recent financial regulation bill: I have no idea if it's good legislation or not, since I'm not going to read all 2000 goddamn pages.
The government is not the one that needs to do something about it. There is more to the US than the government. The American *people* need to do something about Fox News -- namely, stop watching it, and boycott its advertisers.
It's interesting how al-Jazeera handles this. They say "Yes, we are blatantly pro-Palestine, and we're not going to pretend that we're not. But we're going to separate out opinion pieces from actual news, and try very hard to make the latter as objective as we are able to." For the most part, it looks like they do a pretty good job of it -- certainly better than, say, Fox.
If the problem with government is that it no longer serves the will of the people and acts in their best interest, the solution is not to say "Oh, government is corrupt, we need to absolutely minimize its influence"; it's to change the government so that it DOES benefit the public at large.
We created a government to make our lives better. If it no longer does that, then the question of how much government to have isn't the right one to be asking.
It's like going to a doctor, and saying "Doc, I feel sick all the time! Is it because I only eat shit?" The doctor's not going to say "Yes. To fix this, you should eat less" -- he's going to tell you to stop eating shit and eat something else instead.
I hear lots of people on the airwaves saying government -- or at least certain kinds of it -- should be smaller.
Also, the "liberals" that you accuse of wanting big government want bigger government in some areas, and smaller government in others. It's not a "big government vs. small government" issue. The typical US conservative wants a smaller government when it comes to things like education, the Forest Service, and various safety-net type programs, but bigger government when it comes to the Department of Defense and government interference in morals (DOMA, etc.)
The issue with the right to bear arms is that it is meaningless until and unless one can get enough people armed well enough to exercise said violence in a critical situation, which presumably means outshooting the police.
This can only happen with demilitarized police *and* some sort of mechanism in place to stop them from calling for reinforcements from the National Guard. Not sure quite how we get there from here.
The times when a bunch of armed commoners can square off against military forces are over, at least unless ownership of IED-type devices and RPG's becomes common.
No, I don't. But I wouldn't buy hosting from you, and I imagine that many customers wouldn't either if they knew that their stuff was at risk of being taken down for merely being controversial.
I tend to hire reliable people to perform services for me.
They are, though. As soon as you enter into a social contract that gives one class of people a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, you give them the ability to remove lots of these "rights". The only thing stopping them from doing it is that same social contract -- the Constitution, etc. It's a "We'll give you the ability to violate our rights as long as you promise not to use it" sort of thing.
The trouble is that the only thing stopping the ruling group from breaching this contract is the fear that if they do anything egregious then they'll get voted out, and that if they try to not abide by the results of an election then they'll lose support of enough people (including some of the ones they rely on to execute their license to use violence) that they'll lose power anyway.
Unfortunately, they've gotten good at breaking their end of the social contract and still getting elected.
Because it costs them more to haul you around. I'm hypoglycemic and have to eat more than my neighbor; is it discriminatory that my food bill is higher?
I'd completely support a system where
"It costs you what it costs them" is a fair pricing model.
I mostly do outdoor wildlife photography, so I like viewfinders -- I can't see the screen in the sunlight. Good that there's at least the option for one on the NEX if you want one.
For small pancake lenses, I agree -- this, or equivalently the Olympus Micro 4/3 cameras, are a good direction for design to go in. But I'd be interested to see how it handles with a 1.5 or 2-pound on the front, though; if your hand on the lens has to bear most of the weight all the time, it seems like it'd be hard to balance the lens, zoom the lens, and fiddle with camera settings without being able to use your hand holding the camera to bear weight.
"Dual lens reflex" means something different -- some old cameras have two identical lenses mounted near each other. You look through one and shoot through the other, with no movable flippy-mirror.
And since all the phones suck at being both phones and being cameras, I figure it's about time the camera makers made cameras that could also make phone calls.
Slashdot Mirror
What else are you going to make slide film into?
I shoot digital only so don't really have any experience with film, but was there actually anything about Kodachrome that made it unique (in a good way) and will have anyone mourning its demise (other than Paul Simon), or are the newer films universally better?
I've thought about borrowing my dad's OM-1 just to shoot a few rolls of Velvia, but have never gotten around to it. (I have a few OM-mount lenses that I use on digital.)
Everything you said made sense up until the last paragraph, and in principle it's true -- the military would be unlikely to act in open warfare against the citizens. But the military's not what you have to worry about; it's the police.
More relevantly to the American political situation, we have this nice divide between people authorized to use force against Americans (the police) and people authorized to use force against everyone else (the military). In between them we have the National Guard.
We're in a situation right now where even the police can out-shoot anything short of a mass rebellion willing to take enormous casualties, and THEY, unlike the military, aren't shy about using force against the American people -- after all, it's their job.
So, what happens when a bunch of civilians make a mass protest? They get the riot police. Now they're in a wonderfully bad PR situation: the riot police have all sorts of nonlethal weapons that won't cause an outcry if they're used, but the protesters don't have anything like that: it's bullets or nothing.
So the protesters shoot back against the microwave pain rays and tear gas and LRADs (and batons), and the National Guard gets called in. The protesters look bad, since they're the ones who went to lethal force first (since it's all they've got), and the Nat'l Guard is highly unlikely to sympathize with them.
Now, d'you think the military is going to turn on the Guard? Unlikely.
The military's irrelevant to the discussion: whether they will serve as a check on themselves doesn't matter, since it's the police that are likely to be the problem, and THEY won't.
That's because there's a plurality of moderate and/or left news sources out there, while Fox News has a monopoly on far-right television news.
Also, I imagine that moderates and liberals are more likely to not watch TV news in the first place. I'm basically a moderate, and I get most of my news from the Internet (predominantly, BBC News).
I don't think you'll find anything nearly as over-the-top as Glenn Beck on MSNBC. The most over-the-top thing I've seen there is Keith Olbermann sitting in a chair and reading his strongly-written (and articulately-written, for that matter) opinion pieces.
As far as whose message is "basically right", well, isn't that a little arrogant?
And you can't compare television ratings as a way of measuring poli-penises. American righties pretty much all watch Fox News, while more and more liberals and moderates are eschewing television news completely for things like BBC News, the Economist, etc.
Yep, not saying that our current president or administration is "liberal" in anything but name only.
Question for you: in billions of dollars, what do you think a good level of annual expenditures on the military should be?
Unfortunately the idea of literacy tests to vote (which is a good idea, IMO) was forever ruined by the idiot Southerners who used it as a racist measure (if you're an idiot and black you can't vote, but if you're an idiot and white then that's okay, since your grandpa could vote).
Then we need to fix the political system, which is a far bigger problem than how to send bits over wires. If we can't send in a bill about net neutrality without getting something out about kickbacks to Iowa corn farmers (or whatever), then we have a hell of a problem.
Congress suffers from the same problem. Look at the Patriot Act. Or, maybe, this recent financial regulation bill: I have no idea if it's good legislation or not, since I'm not going to read all 2000 goddamn pages.
Compared to the rest of the world they're a right-wing party, really.
The government is not the one that needs to do something about it. There is more to the US than the government. The American *people* need to do something about Fox News -- namely, stop watching it, and boycott its advertisers.
It's interesting how al-Jazeera handles this. They say "Yes, we are blatantly pro-Palestine, and we're not going to pretend that we're not. But we're going to separate out opinion pieces from actual news, and try very hard to make the latter as objective as we are able to." For the most part, it looks like they do a pretty good job of it -- certainly better than, say, Fox.
Thank you for this post.
If the problem with government is that it no longer serves the will of the people and acts in their best interest, the solution is not to say "Oh, government is corrupt, we need to absolutely minimize its influence"; it's to change the government so that it DOES benefit the public at large.
We created a government to make our lives better. If it no longer does that, then the question of how much government to have isn't the right one to be asking.
It's like going to a doctor, and saying "Doc, I feel sick all the time! Is it because I only eat shit?" The doctor's not going to say "Yes. To fix this, you should eat less" -- he's going to tell you to stop eating shit and eat something else instead.
I hear lots of people on the airwaves saying government -- or at least certain kinds of it -- should be smaller.
Also, the "liberals" that you accuse of wanting big government want bigger government in some areas, and smaller government in others. It's not a "big government vs. small government" issue. The typical US conservative wants a smaller government when it comes to things like education, the Forest Service, and various safety-net type programs, but bigger government when it comes to the Department of Defense and government interference in morals (DOMA, etc.)
The issue with the right to bear arms is that it is meaningless until and unless one can get enough people armed well enough to exercise said violence in a critical situation, which presumably means outshooting the police.
This can only happen with demilitarized police *and* some sort of mechanism in place to stop them from calling for reinforcements from the National Guard. Not sure quite how we get there from here.
The times when a bunch of armed commoners can square off against military forces are over, at least unless ownership of IED-type devices and RPG's becomes common.
No, I don't. But I wouldn't buy hosting from you, and I imagine that many customers wouldn't either if they knew that their stuff was at risk of being taken down for merely being controversial.
I tend to hire reliable people to perform services for me.
This is why you are not in the business of selling hosting to other people.
They are, though. As soon as you enter into a social contract that gives one class of people a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, you give them the ability to remove lots of these "rights". The only thing stopping them from doing it is that same social contract -- the Constitution, etc. It's a "We'll give you the ability to violate our rights as long as you promise not to use it" sort of thing.
The trouble is that the only thing stopping the ruling group from breaching this contract is the fear that if they do anything egregious then they'll get voted out, and that if they try to not abide by the results of an election then they'll lose support of enough people (including some of the ones they rely on to execute their license to use violence) that they'll lose power anyway.
Unfortunately, they've gotten good at breaking their end of the social contract and still getting elected.
You're assuming that once taxes are included the European service costs more. This may be the case; it may not.
Because it costs them more to haul you around. I'm hypoglycemic and have to eat more than my neighbor; is it discriminatory that my food bill is higher?
I'd completely support a system where
"It costs you what it costs them" is a fair pricing model.
Ah, I see what you're saying now.
I mostly do outdoor wildlife photography, so I like viewfinders -- I can't see the screen in the sunlight. Good that there's at least the option for one on the NEX if you want one.
For small pancake lenses, I agree -- this, or equivalently the Olympus Micro 4/3 cameras, are a good direction for design to go in. But I'd be interested to see how it handles with a 1.5 or 2-pound on the front, though; if your hand on the lens has to bear most of the weight all the time, it seems like it'd be hard to balance the lens, zoom the lens, and fiddle with camera settings without being able to use your hand holding the camera to bear weight.
I've seen old-but-not-too-old Olympus E-510's (10MP, image stabilization) for $175-200, and my father sold a Rebel XT kit (8MP) to someone for $225.
s/intentionally aggravate/who intentionally aggravates // editing error
"Dual lens reflex" means something different -- some old cameras have two identical lenses mounted near each other. You look through one and shoot through the other, with no movable flippy-mirror.
And since all the phones suck at being both phones and being cameras, I figure it's about time the camera makers made cameras that could also make phone calls.