This is why I don't leave my mail on servers. It's deleted as it is downloaded to my local client, via old style POP3. Mail stored on my own personal property at home does still require a warrant to retrieve.
Yes, this means less convenience, I can't access my email archives wherever I go, but it discourages snooping from remote.
Pick a nice client like thunderbird/mozilla mail and read your mail the classic way - via desktop client. You can even set it to not delete messages on the server for X number of days, so you have your most recent correspondence online, but not the whole pile.
...when your country completely discounts nuclear as the best option for an environmentally friendly energy source. Solar and wind can never be primary energy sources - they are not constant power sources. They can only supplement a steady power source. And they waste so much real estate compared to the alternative that even environmentalists don't like them, especially wind farms. I live in the shadow of one of the biggest wind farms in the United States, and it's an obnoxiously terrible use of land with comparatively little energy in return. At least now they're required to cover the cost of their eventual removal and land restoration.
Frankly I'd rather live next to a modern, safe nuclear power plant. China is appropriately proceeding with caution on the development of their next plants based on lessons learned with Fukishima (see recent slashdot posting) but they did not have a knee jerk "OMG nuclear is bad!" reaction. You fix it, you evolve the design, you move on. That's engineering. You don't go hide in a cave. Even Japan is coming round to the fact that ditching their nuclear reactors wholesale would result in an unacceptable level of energy dependence, plus they'd be burning dirty.
Nuclear is the only future in which we can have the energy abundance we have now, and do it clean. We CAN have both, unlike what some people may like to tell you.
XCOR has a two-stage fully reusable orbital system in early development to directly follow the Lynx. XCOR CEO Jeff Greason has mentioned this during several talks, but the company in general avoids speaking about things which are not actual hardware yet.
Rest assured, however, suborbital systems in general are steeping stones to bigger things, much like Mercury was to Apollo.
...you do it with a stereo camera and verify that it's the person in person and not a photo of that person. There have been previous articles here showing that the technology has been broken using that method, simply holding up a photo of that person to the camera.
Anthropomorphizing a machine because it mimics human behavior and then using that to justify giving it rights is a poor idea.
At some point in the distant future, when we arrive at the 'blade runner' level of replicant, then the issue can be picked up again. But don't put the cart before the horse.
Of course, you don't have to publish the list if you have a redirect that states that it has been blocked by so and so, then you know that it is specifically blocked rather than just turning up a 404.
It IS censorship, because invariably the list of sites to block includes many that have nothing to do with porn, including fine art nudes, nude paintings. Will Deviantart be on that list?
One only has to look at the leaked proposed Australian list to see how bad it is in real life.
The only way that you could begin to do this is to have an open list that's published, with a redress mechanism for people who's sites have been wrongly blocked. The censors hate this because then it gives people a phone directory for all the naughty sites.
don't go. Unfortunately, in reality there will always be enough pleebs that will take them up on their ridiculous offer.
I just can't see why anyone would bother, when you can just stay at home and watch a nice HD feed of the best bits. What a hassle.
When I was in Japan I went to see a Sumo tournament on a whim, and it was great. No rules against photography or video, I shot both just for my own entertainment and had a ball. They have a very different attitude at least when it comes to Sumo.
I will second the lengthy post above, I have been using android phones for a few years now without sharing any data on the cloud, and it's not hard. use POP3/IMAP for email in the regular email client, and don't specify a google account for anything. Everything still works just fine. You can sync your contacts and calendar and such to your local PC with the sync software, that's your backup. No internet services involved.
A warning though. If you decide to install Google+, it will log you on for all other apps on the phone and sync your contacts from Google+ to your phonebook without asking you. When I did that once, I got a ton of duplicate and unwanted contacts in my phone. The people I have phone numbers for are a very small subset of people I have on social networks.
Like several other commenters here, I have Verizon and simply called them up and asked what the options were. They offered to add Canada to my plan, but I only had to pay for the week I was to go there, then they'd revert back to the US-only plan and refund the portion of the month I had not used. They did exactly that, and it all went smoothly.
Now, the important thing to keep in mind is that if you get say a 400MB per month plan for Canada, and you only use it for a week, you can only use 100MB. So if you end up going over that, say 150 MB, what they will do is leave the plan turned on long enough so that it will accomodate what you ended up using, rather than charge the overage at $2/MB or whatever the crazy roaming rate is (it's close to that.)
I checked my usage periodically via the account center on their website, and despite using it heavily for GPS navigation and traffic mapping via google maps and also doing email and web surfing with it, I only used about 60MB total, which was under the 100MB limit I had set for the Canada portion of the plan.
I have to say that I have not had a single bad experience with Verizon customer service so far, in about three years of usage. Compared to AT&T where EVERY phone call to customer service was a horrid ordeal.
All of this is moot if your Island does not have Verizon coverage.
given the demo in the video from the article, you should be able to both create an image-based 3D scene from the data as well as generate a stereo pair. On his laptop he was wiggling the perspective back and forth within the limits of the area that the camera captured. Being able to change the focus and depth of field automatically means that you've got a little bit of what's behind every edge.
I've been using dreamweaver for a long time now. It has not substantially changed and is good for editing run of the mill static web pages with a template.
There are definitely some advantages to home automation, but for now I don't think it's worth the hassle. I've done X-10 and Insteon, and with the Insteon stuff, unless you have perfect power to your house (or whole house UPS) most of the light and switch modules will go bad. I got so tired to fixing broken modules that I took all of it out and put the original switches back in.
things are getting better, but not cheap enough nor good enough to make it worth it for me.
Home automation enthusiasts need to admit that it's still in the hobby phase, much like early computing.
Ever read Heinlein? Lots of good/bad ideas. Rocks are easier to throw downhill. So are nukes. Lots of nefarious uses you could put it to if you wanted.
Strategically, it's the equivalent of taking the castle on top of the hill...much easier to fight invaders coming up, and to reign death down upon anything lower than it.
But like that castle, it is in a precarious position in that supplies can be cut off...
Maybe it's just me, but I find a game environment that's been set up like an interactive movie to be much more enthralling than watching the various asshattery of the internet do their thing in an MMORPG setting. The rare exceptions are Diablo series multiplayer and LFD/LFD2, when played with friends that you know.
The quality of play is much, much higher in the average single person game. It's like a feature film vs. MMORPGs, which can be like a reality TV show featuring the cast of Jersey Shore.
MMORPGs have no ending, and serve only to sap your wallet and your time.
The most engaging game I've played recently is Portal. Unique, and fresh. Looking forward to Portal 2. I've gotten back into Left 4 Dead 2 as mindless entertainment. That's my one FPS vice at the moment. I bought Starcraft II but have not gotten into it as much as I thought I would, RTS games don't seem to hold my interest very long. I really enjoyed GTA: Vice City and San Andreas, so I was surprised when I was completely turned off by Liberty City. I think that was a change in myself more than the game's format.
A little game off steam I enjoyed very much was Machinarium, a delightful puzzle game written entirely in flash that can be had for $5 or less. There are a few more games by the same creator in a similar vein.
I think when you get older, you want care free, relaxing entertainment that can be had in small chunks. No time-sucking MMORPs, ultra-brain intense strategy, etc. Even Diablo you can enjoy very much in small chunks. A dungeon quest here, a little plot advance there. Looking forward to Diablo III.
MMORPs seem to be more addicting social habits than games. Single player games tend to run more like interactive movies, which I guess is what I prefer these days.
Last night I watched the Atlas V launch from Vandenberg from 100 miles away. it was GREAT to be able to see the video of the first moments of the launch on my Android phone and then listen to the radio chatter as I watched it come up over the horizon and soar up through the sky with my own eyes. All of this because my phone supports flash and thus the flash video on spaceflightnow. It played smoothly and without issue as a sat out in the middle of the desert with a good 3G signal on Verizon.
If I had still had my iPhone, which I had until May of this year, I wouldn't have been able to do that. I am so happy to be away from Apple's walled garden I can't begin to describe it.
This thing is trying to compete with the RED camera system and the 5D Mk. II. As others have said, the sensor is already behind. Everyone doing 2K on the cheap is using the 5D Mk. II as a video camera - it has a bigger, better sensor than anything anywhere in that price bracket, plus Canon's awesome lenses. The next step up is the RED system for 4K, which is just on fire right now because of its revolutionary modularity. This thing is pretty small potatoes compared to either of those two. It might be good for student filmmakers though. A school could buy a batch of them.
From a professional photographer's standpoint, I DO appreciate more resolution, because I do make things that end up on posters and billboards. Also, the primary advantage in most cases is the ability to crop and still have a decent resolution image.
As another poster mentioned, the main problem at this point is with the glass. Sharp glass that remains the same size to accommodate a denser, not larger sensor is a tough proposition, and the new frontier of technology. Things like liquid lenses may overcome this in the future, who knows.
Right now, with my 21MP 5D Mk. II, I can use modern Canon "L" zoom lenses too my heart's content and have an image that is sharp from corner to corner, especially now that you can easily correct for chromatic aberration in RAW processing software. (to give you an idea of how far this has come, when I was doing 3D animation 10 years ago, we would commonly add back in chromatic aberration to 3D generated images to give them a sense of realism.)
For the sort of resolution discussed here, if you wanted relatively sharp pixels at 1:1 (spatial, or perceived resolution, actual sharpness delineation from one pixel to the next) you would probably want to stick with prime (non-zoom) lenses with fewer glass elements, and it would probably OK.
Other posters are correct in that this kind of resolution is currently unnecessary for consumer and casual use. But for me, large blow ups and two-page spreads are a frequent thing, and I apprecicate all the pixels I've got.:)
That's pretty normal. The important point is if you get the job done on time and in a time frame considered reasonable. People aren't machines. No one works every second at their desk. It also leads to things like crunch time at the end though, time management is a tough thing for most people. Seems to be the nature of humans though.
Desk workers have it a lot better than assembly line workers, who are always 'on' when they are at their station, until they get their breaks.
Me, I hate clock watching, I don't pay attention to that sort of thing. I just do the job until its done within the required timeframe. But I am fortunate to have a job with a lot of different hats, so I have a large variety in what I do. I switched careers 8 years ago to get away from a job that required me to be at a desk all the time. Sitting at a desk all day is one of the most unhealthy things one can do to oneself.
The important thing is to balance and enjoy what you do. We really have no idea what happens when we die, there is a not-insignificant chance that there is no undying part of us. How do you want to spend your life? In fear of the clock and in guilt towards your employer, or have realistic expectations as a non-digital entity?
Work hard and put in long hours when its warranted. Relax when you need to. Don't kill yourself or you'll burn out quickly and end up quitting anyway. Any excessive exertion will have to be made up for anyhow. It's like sleep - the debt accumulates, you will lose productivity later if you go overboard now. Zero sum game. Have fun, enjoy life, work well, be productive. Work smarter, not harder. Etc.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why I don't leave my mail on servers. It's deleted as it is downloaded to my local client, via old style POP3. Mail stored on my own personal property at home does still require a warrant to retrieve.
Yes, this means less convenience, I can't access my email archives wherever I go, but it discourages snooping from remote.
Pick a nice client like thunderbird/mozilla mail and read your mail the classic way - via desktop client. You can even set it to not delete messages on the server for X number of days, so you have your most recent correspondence online, but not the whole pile.
...when your country completely discounts nuclear as the best option for an environmentally friendly energy source. Solar and wind can never be primary energy sources - they are not constant power sources. They can only supplement a steady power source. And they waste so much real estate compared to the alternative that even environmentalists don't like them, especially wind farms. I live in the shadow of one of the biggest wind farms in the United States, and it's an obnoxiously terrible use of land with comparatively little energy in return. At least now they're required to cover the cost of their eventual removal and land restoration.
Frankly I'd rather live next to a modern, safe nuclear power plant. China is appropriately proceeding with caution on the development of their next plants based on lessons learned with Fukishima (see recent slashdot posting) but they did not have a knee jerk "OMG nuclear is bad!" reaction. You fix it, you evolve the design, you move on. That's engineering. You don't go hide in a cave. Even Japan is coming round to the fact that ditching their nuclear reactors wholesale would result in an unacceptable level of energy dependence, plus they'd be burning dirty.
Nuclear is the only future in which we can have the energy abundance we have now, and do it clean. We CAN have both, unlike what some people may like to tell you.
Obvious troll is obvious. Have you been in the XCOR hangar lately? I didn't think so.
XCOR has a two-stage fully reusable orbital system in early development to directly follow the Lynx. XCOR CEO Jeff Greason has mentioned this during several talks, but the company in general avoids speaking about things which are not actual hardware yet.
Rest assured, however, suborbital systems in general are steeping stones to bigger things, much like Mercury was to Apollo.
...you do it with a stereo camera and verify that it's the person in person and not a photo of that person. There have been previous articles here showing that the technology has been broken using that method, simply holding up a photo of that person to the camera.
Anthropomorphizing a machine because it mimics human behavior and then using that to justify giving it rights is a poor idea.
At some point in the distant future, when we arrive at the 'blade runner' level of replicant, then the issue can be picked up again. But don't put the cart before the horse.
Of course, you don't have to publish the list if you have a redirect that states that it has been blocked by so and so, then you know that it is specifically blocked rather than just turning up a 404.
It IS censorship, because invariably the list of sites to block includes many that have nothing to do with porn, including fine art nudes, nude paintings. Will Deviantart be on that list?
One only has to look at the leaked proposed Australian list to see how bad it is in real life.
The only way that you could begin to do this is to have an open list that's published, with a redress mechanism for people who's sites have been wrongly blocked. The censors hate this because then it gives people a phone directory for all the naughty sites.
don't go. Unfortunately, in reality there will always be enough pleebs that will take them up on their ridiculous offer.
I just can't see why anyone would bother, when you can just stay at home and watch a nice HD feed of the best bits. What a hassle.
When I was in Japan I went to see a Sumo tournament on a whim, and it was great. No rules against photography or video, I shot both just for my own entertainment and had a ball. They have a very different attitude at least when it comes to Sumo.
I will second the lengthy post above, I have been using android phones for a few years now without sharing any data on the cloud, and it's not hard. use POP3/IMAP for email in the regular email client, and don't specify a google account for anything. Everything still works just fine. You can sync your contacts and calendar and such to your local PC with the sync software, that's your backup. No internet services involved.
A warning though. If you decide to install Google+, it will log you on for all other apps on the phone and sync your contacts from Google+ to your phonebook without asking you. When I did that once, I got a ton of duplicate and unwanted contacts in my phone. The people I have phone numbers for are a very small subset of people I have on social networks.
Google+ is a failed product at this point anyhow.
Yes that's what I meant to say. Thanks for the correction. And it is fortunate that Verizon is CDMA for that kind of interoperability.
Like several other commenters here, I have Verizon and simply called them up and asked what the options were. They offered to add Canada to my plan, but I only had to pay for the week I was to go there, then they'd revert back to the US-only plan and refund the portion of the month I had not used. They did exactly that, and it all went smoothly.
Now, the important thing to keep in mind is that if you get say a 400MB per month plan for Canada, and you only use it for a week, you can only use 100MB. So if you end up going over that, say 150 MB, what they will do is leave the plan turned on long enough so that it will accomodate what you ended up using, rather than charge the overage at $2/MB or whatever the crazy roaming rate is (it's close to that.)
I checked my usage periodically via the account center on their website, and despite using it heavily for GPS navigation and traffic mapping via google maps and also doing email and web surfing with it, I only used about 60MB total, which was under the 100MB limit I had set for the Canada portion of the plan.
I have to say that I have not had a single bad experience with Verizon customer service so far, in about three years of usage. Compared to AT&T where EVERY phone call to customer service was a horrid ordeal.
All of this is moot if your Island does not have Verizon coverage.
given the demo in the video from the article, you should be able to both create an image-based 3D scene from the data as well as generate a stereo pair. On his laptop he was wiggling the perspective back and forth within the limits of the area that the camera captured. Being able to change the focus and depth of field automatically means that you've got a little bit of what's behind every edge.
I've been using dreamweaver for a long time now. It has not substantially changed and is good for editing run of the mill static web pages with a template.
There are definitely some advantages to home automation, but for now I don't think it's worth the hassle. I've done X-10 and Insteon, and with the Insteon stuff, unless you have perfect power to your house (or whole house UPS) most of the light and switch modules will go bad. I got so tired to fixing broken modules that I took all of it out and put the original switches back in.
things are getting better, but not cheap enough nor good enough to make it worth it for me.
Home automation enthusiasts need to admit that it's still in the hobby phase, much like early computing.
Ever read Heinlein? Lots of good/bad ideas. Rocks are easier to throw downhill. So are nukes. Lots of nefarious uses you could put it to if you wanted.
Strategically, it's the equivalent of taking the castle on top of the hill...much easier to fight invaders coming up, and to reign death down upon anything lower than it.
But like that castle, it is in a precarious position in that supplies can be cut off...
Maybe it's just me, but I find a game environment that's been set up like an interactive movie to be much more enthralling than watching the various asshattery of the internet do their thing in an MMORPG setting. The rare exceptions are Diablo series multiplayer and LFD/LFD2, when played with friends that you know.
The quality of play is much, much higher in the average single person game. It's like a feature film vs. MMORPGs, which can be like a reality TV show featuring the cast of Jersey Shore.
MMORPGs have no ending, and serve only to sap your wallet and your time.
How do you 'complete' an MMORPG that's designed to keep you paying the monthly fee for as long as possible?
The most engaging game I've played recently is Portal. Unique, and fresh. Looking forward to Portal 2. I've gotten back into Left 4 Dead 2 as mindless entertainment. That's my one FPS vice at the moment. I bought Starcraft II but have not gotten into it as much as I thought I would, RTS games don't seem to hold my interest very long. I really enjoyed GTA: Vice City and San Andreas, so I was surprised when I was completely turned off by Liberty City. I think that was a change in myself more than the game's format.
A little game off steam I enjoyed very much was Machinarium, a delightful puzzle game written entirely in flash that can be had for $5 or less. There are a few more games by the same creator in a similar vein.
I think when you get older, you want care free, relaxing entertainment that can be had in small chunks. No time-sucking MMORPs, ultra-brain intense strategy, etc. Even Diablo you can enjoy very much in small chunks. A dungeon quest here, a little plot advance there. Looking forward to Diablo III.
MMORPs seem to be more addicting social habits than games. Single player games tend to run more like interactive movies, which I guess is what I prefer these days.
Last night I watched the Atlas V launch from Vandenberg from 100 miles away. it was GREAT to be able to see the video of the first moments of the launch on my Android phone and then listen to the radio chatter as I watched it come up over the horizon and soar up through the sky with my own eyes. All of this because my phone supports flash and thus the flash video on spaceflightnow. It played smoothly and without issue as a sat out in the middle of the desert with a good 3G signal on Verizon.
If I had still had my iPhone, which I had until May of this year, I wouldn't have been able to do that. I am so happy to be away from Apple's walled garden I can't begin to describe it.
Unfortunately, without a profit motive, this tends to be the case.
yea, and it's using C-mount lenses, this thing is obviously not designed to compete with full sized sensors and cameras...
This thing is trying to compete with the RED camera system and the 5D Mk. II. As others have said, the sensor is already behind. Everyone doing 2K on the cheap is using the 5D Mk. II as a video camera - it has a bigger, better sensor than anything anywhere in that price bracket, plus Canon's awesome lenses. The next step up is the RED system for 4K, which is just on fire right now because of its revolutionary modularity. This thing is pretty small potatoes compared to either of those two. It might be good for student filmmakers though. A school could buy a batch of them.
From a professional photographer's standpoint, I DO appreciate more resolution, because I do make things that end up on posters and billboards. Also, the primary advantage in most cases is the ability to crop and still have a decent resolution image.
As another poster mentioned, the main problem at this point is with the glass. Sharp glass that remains the same size to accommodate a denser, not larger sensor is a tough proposition, and the new frontier of technology. Things like liquid lenses may overcome this in the future, who knows.
Right now, with my 21MP 5D Mk. II, I can use modern Canon "L" zoom lenses too my heart's content and have an image that is sharp from corner to corner, especially now that you can easily correct for chromatic aberration in RAW processing software. (to give you an idea of how far this has come, when I was doing 3D animation 10 years ago, we would commonly add back in chromatic aberration to 3D generated images to give them a sense of realism.)
For the sort of resolution discussed here, if you wanted relatively sharp pixels at 1:1 (spatial, or perceived resolution, actual sharpness delineation from one pixel to the next) you would probably want to stick with prime (non-zoom) lenses with fewer glass elements, and it would probably OK.
Other posters are correct in that this kind of resolution is currently unnecessary for consumer and casual use. But for me, large blow ups and two-page spreads are a frequent thing, and I apprecicate all the pixels I've got. :)
That's pretty normal. The important point is if you get the job done on time and in a time frame considered reasonable. People aren't machines. No one works every second at their desk. It also leads to things like crunch time at the end though, time management is a tough thing for most people. Seems to be the nature of humans though.
Desk workers have it a lot better than assembly line workers, who are always 'on' when they are at their station, until they get their breaks.
Me, I hate clock watching, I don't pay attention to that sort of thing. I just do the job until its done within the required timeframe. But I am fortunate to have a job with a lot of different hats, so I have a large variety in what I do. I switched careers 8 years ago to get away from a job that required me to be at a desk all the time. Sitting at a desk all day is one of the most unhealthy things one can do to oneself.
The important thing is to balance and enjoy what you do. We really have no idea what happens when we die, there is a not-insignificant chance that there is no undying part of us. How do you want to spend your life? In fear of the clock and in guilt towards your employer, or have realistic expectations as a non-digital entity?
Work hard and put in long hours when its warranted. Relax when you need to. Don't kill yourself or you'll burn out quickly and end up quitting anyway. Any excessive exertion will have to be made up for anyhow. It's like sleep - the debt accumulates, you will lose productivity later if you go overboard now. Zero sum game. Have fun, enjoy life, work well, be productive. Work smarter, not harder. Etc.