Being near the moon doesn't seem to me immediately better than any other place in orbit, and in many ways worse. If you want to mine regolith, just plant your colony on the surface. If you want to be close to Earth, LEO is closer and you get radiation protection from the magnetosphere. If you want to mine asteroids, go to where they are, or bring them to LEO. If you want something planet-like, Mars has more resources that are easier to use (ice, plenty of carbon readily accessible in the atmosphere).
I know people get excited about L1 and L2 and low-energy transfers, but that only works if you're willing to wait years to get to your destination - which isn't going to make sense for human spaceflight, at least until we can reliably solve the gravity and radiation issues, both of which are only solved long-term with lots of mass.
Back in the 70's and 80's, people recorded dolphin vocalizations, and identified the equivalent of human phonemes, basically just different sound patterns that would occur repeatedly. By collecting a lot of data, and counting up the occurrences of distinct phonemes, they were able to show a phoneme frequency that matches the exact same patterns as human speech (frequency here meaning how often a phoneme occurs, not the frequency of the sound waves).
For instance, "the" occurred 6 times in the paragraph above, "and" occurs 3 times, and words like "vocalization" occur once - far less often. All human languages have this distribution where a small quantity of words makes up the bulk of common conversation, whereas things like bird calls or other vocalizations from less intelligent species follow a more flat distribution.
The point being, we've known for a long time that dolphins communicate using something very similar to human speech. This is pretty neat progress, but IMO it's pretty disheartening that after several decades we're still not anywhere near understanding their language. If we can't figure out how to communicate with fellow mammals sharing a common lineage, it really challenges the common sci-fi trope of having any kind of meaningful discourse with a creature from the other side of the galaxy.
The 3.5mm standard may not be established in an ISO document somewhere, but in a practical sense it's as reliable a standard as you're likely to find. I've had lots of problems with Micro-USB, for instance - some cables fit in snugly, some fit loosely, etc. But I've never had a 3.5mm connection fail, and they are so simple and ubiquitous that they have allowed some neat third-party hardware (think Square payment systems). That's not the kind of thing you can roll out without a solid standard in place (either formal or de facto).
The standard has been just fine for all previous generations of iPhone, and for other Apple hardware as well. This is just a money grab, and it's going to lead to new and needless complexity in one of the very few technology interfaces that had remained pretty foolproof.
Am I the only one to think this sounds like a badass way to trial various technologies for space colonization? A substantial amount of the ECLSS tech will be transferable, for starters. I get that everyone wants to be suspicious of China all the time, but they are serious about their space program, and this gives them a chance to be the first to create a continual human presence in a deep-sea habitat. Pretty cool IMO.
Perpetual motion cannot be proven to be impossible.
Well, you can't prove that there are no invisible pink unicorns. That doesn't mean that we should believe in invisible pink unicorns. Proving a phenomenon impossible in a strict sense is, itself, impossible. That said, with perpetual motion, we're about as close to a proof as you can get - conservation of energy has been tested and confirmed in a million different ways both experimentally and observationally, and if conservation of energy is a valid priniciple, perpetual motion is expressly prohibited. What's more, people have been working on perpetual motion machines for centuries, and not a single example has ever withstood scrutiny.
In fact it appears to exist, just to not be (directly) useful.
Citation needed. Nobody credible is calling virtual particles perpetual motion. And what I'm talking about (and what OP was talking about) is a machine that generates infinite energy - such a thing is entirely impossible, and any trained physicist or engineer will dismiss it outright because it's a fantasy and completely contradicts many of our most useful, fundamental, and well-verified principles in physics.
You wouldn't actually use a set of these things to push a fucking rocket around space, morons. You would put a set of these things around an axis like a chinese fire wheel, and allow their greater than 100% efficiency to spin them around the axis producing a limitless energy production in the zero gravity.
This is why we need skepticism. Because this is precisely backwards - if the EM Drive can do that, then the entire universe breaks. 1+1 = 17 and conservation of energy goes away. Centuries of physics gets tossed into the shredder.
On the other hand, if the EM Drive can produce small but consistent levels of thrust without using propellant, and do it in a way that doesn't break conservation of energy, then it is completely useful for space travel, and could open up space travel in a huge way, but still operate within reasonable constraints. We update the models, maybe finally make some progress on unifying quantum mechanics and relativity, and have a nifty new effect to start playing with.
The thing is, as soon as you say with a straight face that something is "limitless", you've left the realm of science and entered fantasy land. We need dreamers, but we also need people who will take the 10 minutes of wikipedia reading needed to understand the laws of thermodynamics, and use filters to separate the implausible ideas (propellant-less propulsion) from the laughable ones (infinite energy machines). A refusal to accept perpetual motion machines (like what you describe) isn't even skepticism - it's just common sense for anybody who has developed a cursory understanding of physics.
I think you must work a dance hall very differently than I would, based on your focal length. I'm generally at 35mm or wider (on APS-C) so I'm pretty close and mixed in among the action. In that context, if I have a need for flash (which means the house lights are way down and the DJ has some effects going) then it inherently blends into the existing atmosphere of pulsing music and strobing lights. Ceremonies I shoot almost exclusively with ambient lighting because that's a quiet, subdued event where I don't want to attract attention, but at a reception I'm one dude in the mix of a bunch of dancers, adding a little bit of light to the situation isn't likely to be a problem.
Flash gets you brighter colors, sharper details, and most importantly, control over the situation - if you MUST get a shot at a precise moment, and don't know what the lighting is or how cooperative your subject is going to be (think cutting cake, bouquet toss, etc) then I find you don't have the privilege of setting up your focus point in advance and waiting for the subject to cooperate - eyes might be closed, subject might move in the opposite direction than you predict, or whatever. You can also line up an off camera flash for a cool effect, change your setup throughout the evening for variety, etc... So you proactively move focus and lighting to where the action is and where you need to be.
So, honestly, I would bet that a portrait lens with ambient lighting is the last thing most photographers would want for a dance or reception, except for a couple niche cases like the slow dances (father/daughter, etc) and maybe toasts - everything with action in it will probably come out better with a wider lens and flash. Of course, some of the most creative shots can come from breaking the standard rules, but to get back to the original point I think a 50/1.4 or 35/2.0 is going to be plenty fast to shoot a reception competently with a modern DSLR that can do decent ISO. If that setup can't get you your shot, your photography will be improved more by $1000 worth of flash gear than the >>$1000 you'll be spending to get a lens that only offers another fraction of a stop in speed.
Well, if you're trying to keep shutter speed high, I can see the need for that. I've shot plenty of wedding receptions that are painfully dark though - and the majority of the time, the best answer is just off-camera flash, or bounce flash if the situation is right. I'm mainly saying that because a lot of times the camera is physically capable of focusing and I could, in-principle, crank up the ISO and shoot without extra lighting, but in situations like that your colors are so muted and there's so little dynamic range in the lighting environment that the pictures that come out are flat and drab, or schizophrenic and nonsensical depending on the DJ's lighting setup.
Much better to have an off-camera flash or two, slow that shutter down enough to get a hint of motion blur and ambient lighting, but rely on the flash to keep the subject nice and sharp. Some of those scenarios really have been so dark though that I can't actually see well enough to compose a shot very well (I can tell that people are dancing, but can't see expressions, etc) so it really is a "shot in the dark". Thankfully, I still often manage to get some fun expressions and positions.;)
Everybody has their own style, but for myself I find that all my favorite dark reception hall shots are made with a setup along those lines - and honestly, the wide aperture is more of a hazard than a benefit so I find myself at 4.0 as often as not, because things are moving so fast that getting a razor-thin DOF dialed in exactly where you want it is next to impossible. The off-camera lighting provides the drama and subject isolation that you usually rely on bokeh for.
Even with the high iso capabilities of modern dslr's, I've still found situations (not at weddings) where the f/1.4 on my 50mm and 85mm lenses hasn't quite done the job to my liking.
Really? I have a tough time imagining that situation. If you need f/1.4 and ISO 12800 (any modern DSLR should be able to do this passably) things can be so dark that it becomes difficult to compose a shot because you simply can't see. At that point the camera system is rivaling or exceeding the capability of human night vision. That becomes "good enough" in my book, because even if I could get noiseless, focused images with f/1.2 and ISO 52800, I'd just be pointing and clicking in random directions in a pitch black room.
My wife is a photographer and I'm her second shooter for weddings - we've got Pentax K-5 bodies (APS-C) and yep, a 17-70mm/4.0 is my workhorse, which translates about the same. She tends to use the 16-50mm/2.8, which is decent but honestly her and I both prefer to have a backup body with a prime. The humble 50mm/1.4 actually does really well, I also really love the FA Limited 31mm/1.8 and the 35mm/2.0 (the best $300 we ever spent on photo gear).
I honestly never feel like there's something I want to do in the context of wedding photography that I don't have a lens for... except maybe that Nikon 200mm/2.0. If I had unlimited cash, that one might convince me to switch brands. But even then, a lot of those exotic lenses end up being gimmicky for wedding work - you use it for a shot or two, but it's too specialized for most situations. After getting the basic fast primes and fast-ish zooms, we really just rent specialty lenses here and there but haven't found any worth owning.
Since we actually try to make some money on this endeavor, we are pretty practical about gear choices. Better to have multiple last-gen camera bodies that can take a beating and provide redundancy than the latest whiz-bang camera that will depreciate like crazy. So I imagine we'll make the jump to the K-1 in a year or two, but at that point there will be an investment in longer lenses as well to account for the changeover from cropped sensor. Digital camera bodies became "good enough" for 99% of wedding situations about 3 years ago, so at this point the extra expenditure for upgrades is hard to justify.
Work on your statistics. The study says 90% of vehicle-days could be adequately handled by current electrical vehicles and the supporting infrastructure that's currently in place. Not everybody has equivalent driving habits, so assuming that 10% of the time an electric car "won't work for you" is both misleading and outright wrong.
What's important to understand is that there is a distribution of driving habits, which happen to average out to 90%. There are people for whom 0-10% of vehicle-days could be addressed by an electric car (people who drive long distances as part of their work, for instance), and people for whom that number is 99%-100%. For myself, I haven't driven more than 200 miles in a day for the last few years - I travel, but if I go out of the state I fly. As well, we own two cars in my family, so owning an efficient electric car for commuting and a larger, gasoline powered car for long trips would be a practical way to make sure we still had the road trip capability if we needed it.
The correct conclusion from this article is precisely what it states: for 90% of vehicle-days in the U.S., electric vehicles will do the trick. The fact that the number is so high means a couple of other things - there can't be very many 10% drivers in the population, otherwise it would drag the average down... with an average of 90%, there must be a lot of drivers close to 100% to offset each driver with low numbers. In a population of 10, you would arrive at that 90% average by having 9 drivers at 100% and one driver at 0%.
So, the real lesson here is that for a tiny part of the population, EVs never work. For most of the population, EVs always, or almost always work. This is a simple result of the math, and in fact the expectation would be that a typical, median driver would be happy with an EV > 90% of the time.
So really, the best way to lie to the public is for someone like you to use % incorrectly. Using statistics appropriately is no problem whatsoever.
That might be something different entirely... one early trailer for The Incredibles was almost a short film. It showed Mr. Incredible getting a call on his emergency superhero phone and then struggling to fit his out-of-shape self into his old costume. The scene wasn't in the movie, and it wouldn't have really fit into the plot at all - it just demonstrated the overall theme of the film, and one of the characters.
Or, consider: there was a Deadpool poster that satirically represented the movie as a romantic comedy when in actuality it was a dark comedy/action-adventure, but it was fitting with the character's snarky and prank-oriented disposition.
I'm not sure where you draw the line on presenting films truthfully without significantly constraining the creative freedom allowed in movie advertisements. Trailers are themselves an art form, and sometimes a trailer that doesn't contain a single actual scene from the movie can be extremely effective. Consider also the Deadpool promotional video where he was just laying in front of a fireplace, talking about the movie. Nobody would reasonably expect that such a scene would actually be in the movie.
The DMCA isn't good, but there are lots of farm equipment manufacturers, auto companies, etc that don't sue their customers. The difference between Saab and John Deere in this case is that John Deere is going out of its way to behave in an unethical manner and screw its customers over.
What I'm really arguing against is this subtle subtext that says John Deere's actions are the fault of the government, and that if only the government wasn't around this kind of crap wouldn't be happening. A long history of anti-competitive, anti-consumer behavior by corporations that think they can get away with it says otherwise. Repeal the DMCA, but also create legislation protecting the consumer's right to repair, modify, sell, and otherwise control equipment that they legally purchased.
You should read Charles Stross' "Halting State". Forget data gathering, AR apps can be used to get people to do useful tasks for you, for free! Need someone to scope out a target of interest? Make it an objective in the game for them to take a picture of the area. Need someone to deliver a message or carry information discreetly? Make it part of the game, and give them points when the message is successfully dropped off.
Controlling a popular AR game would allow you to create mobs on demand. This is limited only by the imagination.
No, if the DMCA did not exist, open-market service people couldn't be hauled into court for hacking around whatever DRM Deere were to put on its tractors.
The DMCA doesn't help things, certainly, but nothing is forcing John Deere to abuse the laws and their customers this way. Plenty of unethical corporate behavior can happen even if there isn't a convenient legal framework to take advantage of. My main point is this: a specific piece of law might be contributing to this problem, but that doesn't mean that the solution is deregulation. We've already got a corporation that has demonstrated it will prioritize profit over its customers, and removing regulations, many of which involve consumer protections, isn't the solution. Instead, we need legislation in favor of the consumer, to protect their rights to do what they wish with equipment that they own.
Of course, repealing the DMCA would be a welcome step as well.
The hell are you talking about? Try reading comprehension. The government doesn't prevent anybody from creating a competing business (as evidenced by the fact that there are, in fact, many competitors to John Deere, some of which treat their customers well and make their equipment easy to service). If the government is responsible for anything here, it's that it has failed to hold unethical companies accountable for anti-competitive, anti-consumer practices.
My point is not that competing with John Deere would be easy - it is hard, but not mainly because of anything the government is doing. Sure, the DMCA is shitty, but if it didn't exist John Deere could still design proprietary, closed systems and refuse to sell repair manuals or spare parts. There are lots of corporations out there engaging in similar anti-competitive behavior. What is really needed is better consumer protections that ensure a user's right to modify and repair their belongings regardless of what the corporation wants them to do.
Enforcing that is your choice as a corporation. You don't have to design proprietary, closed equipment and then prosecute those who try to repair it themselves. As evidenced by the fact that there are manufacturers out there that design open, accessible products that are user-friendly and easy to service.
The laws are written in a way that mostly benefits the corporations and largest businesses - they're being given protection from the upstarts that would swing in and provide cheaper/better/faster solutions by the government.
How? Give me an example of how the government is preventing someone new from competing in the tractor business. Because I've started more than one business, and the government barriers amount to about $50 of registration fees and 20 minutes registering the business online. The far bigger barriers are that John Deere has immense brand recognition, distribution and maintenance infrastructure, manufacturing facilities, and who knows how many other advantages that have nothing to do with the government but mean any competitor is going to have to be extraordinarily well funded to make a solid attempt at disruption.
The natural state of a market is that entrenched players have a massive advantage, and can use that massive advantage to keep any competitors from becoming a threat. When you're talking about manufacturing heavy machinery, this isn't something where any schmo off the street can just start selling tractors without licensing BS. The barriers that exist to competing in this industry have nothing to do with government.
ATK, ULA, Orbital, AR, and many others are struggling to adapt to the new market. The thing is, though, for the purpose of these companies, Newspace basically is SpaceX - in a few years the situation may be different with Blue Origin and others, but currently SpaceX is the one and only company that's actually launching payloads for serious customers.
My point is that what separates Oldspace from Newspace isn't just the COTS, fixed-price model. That's a step in the right direction, but what really sets these new companies apart are their ideology - all the older companies exist primarily to turn a profit, and selling aerospace hardware is how they do it, whereas many of the new companies (or at least SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Planetary Resources) exist primarily to make space accessible to the masses, and profit is a means to that end.
Old Space = "cost plus" contracts - Whoops, we've gone over the budget, but keep paying us until we're done!
New Space = fixed-price contracts - Whoops, our rocket went RUD from a bad strut, now we have to launch another one without you giving us more money!
Slight correction - on fixed price contracts, the contractor doesn't have to pay when a launch fails - that's covered by insurance either way.
The important thing is that on a fixed price, the launch provider gets more profit if they reduce launch costs and schedules. On cost-plus, the provider is incentivized to have cost overruns and schedule slips.
And more important than all of that is that we have ideologically driven billionaires competing to make space cheaper - SpaceX is tremendously affordable (~25% the price of competitors) not just because of COTS, but because Musk is trying to build all the infrastructure for a Mars colony in his lifetime. A more pragmatic company would be 90% of the competitor's price, and would be sitting back and enjoying the profits rather than dumping them all right back into develpment of insanely ambitious new vehicles.
Just wanted to say sorry for the internet douchebags out there giving you shit. It's easy for people who have been thin for life to see it as a discipline issue, but there's lots of research showing that the regularly recommended starvation strategies actually lead to no benefit over time or even weight gain because of the body's permanent decrease in metabolic rates.
For a production run it will be an ASIC, but same principle applies - almost all that functionality could be hardware emulated on a single chip today, very easily.
Statistically speaking, we are currently governed mostly by lawyers. Oh, and the rich. If you are a rich, charismatic lawyer, your future as a politician is bright.
Of course scientists aren't perfectly rational. But do you think they are better at making policy decisions than what we currently have? Or more objective than the topmost 0.1% of the rich who have never depended on a paycheck? Just demanding supporting evidence would be a huge improvement over how policy is currently set: by debates that are little more than an extensive survey of the various logical fallacies, and by forming coalitions of selfish lawmakers who are either getting personal kickbacks or pork for their home district.
Besides, for everybody who is panicking that scientists will lead us to some sort of horror novel society where ethics are forgotten, scientific thinking makes you more moral.
The question isn't whether Tyson's Rationalia would be perfect - it's whether it would be better than our current government which amounts to groupthink among advantaged narcissists. The answer seems pretty clear to me. Let's elect some more scientists and engineers, and let's demand the same burden of proof on policymakers that we expect of middle school science fair projects.
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Being near the moon doesn't seem to me immediately better than any other place in orbit, and in many ways worse. If you want to mine regolith, just plant your colony on the surface. If you want to be close to Earth, LEO is closer and you get radiation protection from the magnetosphere. If you want to mine asteroids, go to where they are, or bring them to LEO. If you want something planet-like, Mars has more resources that are easier to use (ice, plenty of carbon readily accessible in the atmosphere).
I know people get excited about L1 and L2 and low-energy transfers, but that only works if you're willing to wait years to get to your destination - which isn't going to make sense for human spaceflight, at least until we can reliably solve the gravity and radiation issues, both of which are only solved long-term with lots of mass.
Back in the 70's and 80's, people recorded dolphin vocalizations, and identified the equivalent of human phonemes, basically just different sound patterns that would occur repeatedly. By collecting a lot of data, and counting up the occurrences of distinct phonemes, they were able to show a phoneme frequency that matches the exact same patterns as human speech (frequency here meaning how often a phoneme occurs, not the frequency of the sound waves).
For instance, "the" occurred 6 times in the paragraph above, "and" occurs 3 times, and words like "vocalization" occur once - far less often. All human languages have this distribution where a small quantity of words makes up the bulk of common conversation, whereas things like bird calls or other vocalizations from less intelligent species follow a more flat distribution.
The point being, we've known for a long time that dolphins communicate using something very similar to human speech. This is pretty neat progress, but IMO it's pretty disheartening that after several decades we're still not anywhere near understanding their language. If we can't figure out how to communicate with fellow mammals sharing a common lineage, it really challenges the common sci-fi trope of having any kind of meaningful discourse with a creature from the other side of the galaxy.
The 3.5mm standard may not be established in an ISO document somewhere, but in a practical sense it's as reliable a standard as you're likely to find. I've had lots of problems with Micro-USB, for instance - some cables fit in snugly, some fit loosely, etc. But I've never had a 3.5mm connection fail, and they are so simple and ubiquitous that they have allowed some neat third-party hardware (think Square payment systems). That's not the kind of thing you can roll out without a solid standard in place (either formal or de facto).
The standard has been just fine for all previous generations of iPhone, and for other Apple hardware as well. This is just a money grab, and it's going to lead to new and needless complexity in one of the very few technology interfaces that had remained pretty foolproof.
Am I the only one to think this sounds like a badass way to trial various technologies for space colonization? A substantial amount of the ECLSS tech will be transferable, for starters. I get that everyone wants to be suspicious of China all the time, but they are serious about their space program, and this gives them a chance to be the first to create a continual human presence in a deep-sea habitat. Pretty cool IMO.
Perpetual motion cannot be proven to be impossible.
Well, you can't prove that there are no invisible pink unicorns. That doesn't mean that we should believe in invisible pink unicorns. Proving a phenomenon impossible in a strict sense is, itself, impossible. That said, with perpetual motion, we're about as close to a proof as you can get - conservation of energy has been tested and confirmed in a million different ways both experimentally and observationally, and if conservation of energy is a valid priniciple, perpetual motion is expressly prohibited. What's more, people have been working on perpetual motion machines for centuries, and not a single example has ever withstood scrutiny.
In fact it appears to exist, just to not be (directly) useful.
Citation needed. Nobody credible is calling virtual particles perpetual motion. And what I'm talking about (and what OP was talking about) is a machine that generates infinite energy - such a thing is entirely impossible, and any trained physicist or engineer will dismiss it outright because it's a fantasy and completely contradicts many of our most useful, fundamental, and well-verified principles in physics.
I was agreeing with you in principle until this:
You wouldn't actually use a set of these things to push a fucking rocket around space, morons. You would put a set of these things around an axis like a chinese fire wheel, and allow their greater than 100% efficiency to spin them around the axis producing a limitless energy production in the zero gravity.
This is why we need skepticism. Because this is precisely backwards - if the EM Drive can do that, then the entire universe breaks. 1+1 = 17 and conservation of energy goes away. Centuries of physics gets tossed into the shredder.
On the other hand, if the EM Drive can produce small but consistent levels of thrust without using propellant, and do it in a way that doesn't break conservation of energy, then it is completely useful for space travel, and could open up space travel in a huge way, but still operate within reasonable constraints. We update the models, maybe finally make some progress on unifying quantum mechanics and relativity, and have a nifty new effect to start playing with.
The thing is, as soon as you say with a straight face that something is "limitless", you've left the realm of science and entered fantasy land. We need dreamers, but we also need people who will take the 10 minutes of wikipedia reading needed to understand the laws of thermodynamics, and use filters to separate the implausible ideas (propellant-less propulsion) from the laughable ones (infinite energy machines). A refusal to accept perpetual motion machines (like what you describe) isn't even skepticism - it's just common sense for anybody who has developed a cursory understanding of physics.
I think you must work a dance hall very differently than I would, based on your focal length. I'm generally at 35mm or wider (on APS-C) so I'm pretty close and mixed in among the action. In that context, if I have a need for flash (which means the house lights are way down and the DJ has some effects going) then it inherently blends into the existing atmosphere of pulsing music and strobing lights. Ceremonies I shoot almost exclusively with ambient lighting because that's a quiet, subdued event where I don't want to attract attention, but at a reception I'm one dude in the mix of a bunch of dancers, adding a little bit of light to the situation isn't likely to be a problem.
In that context, flash is about as far from "samey" as you can get, IMO. For some examples, ambient lighting at receptions often gets you results like this: http://stevewatkinsphotography...
or this: http://static.photo.net/attach...
While flash gets you images more along the lines of this: http://www.melissajill.com/ima...
or this: http://static.jasminestar.com/...
Flash gets you brighter colors, sharper details, and most importantly, control over the situation - if you MUST get a shot at a precise moment, and don't know what the lighting is or how cooperative your subject is going to be (think cutting cake, bouquet toss, etc) then I find you don't have the privilege of setting up your focus point in advance and waiting for the subject to cooperate - eyes might be closed, subject might move in the opposite direction than you predict, or whatever. You can also line up an off camera flash for a cool effect, change your setup throughout the evening for variety, etc... So you proactively move focus and lighting to where the action is and where you need to be.
So, honestly, I would bet that a portrait lens with ambient lighting is the last thing most photographers would want for a dance or reception, except for a couple niche cases like the slow dances (father/daughter, etc) and maybe toasts - everything with action in it will probably come out better with a wider lens and flash. Of course, some of the most creative shots can come from breaking the standard rules, but to get back to the original point I think a 50/1.4 or 35/2.0 is going to be plenty fast to shoot a reception competently with a modern DSLR that can do decent ISO. If that setup can't get you your shot, your photography will be improved more by $1000 worth of flash gear than the >>$1000 you'll be spending to get a lens that only offers another fraction of a stop in speed.
Well, if you're trying to keep shutter speed high, I can see the need for that. I've shot plenty of wedding receptions that are painfully dark though - and the majority of the time, the best answer is just off-camera flash, or bounce flash if the situation is right. I'm mainly saying that because a lot of times the camera is physically capable of focusing and I could, in-principle, crank up the ISO and shoot without extra lighting, but in situations like that your colors are so muted and there's so little dynamic range in the lighting environment that the pictures that come out are flat and drab, or schizophrenic and nonsensical depending on the DJ's lighting setup.
Much better to have an off-camera flash or two, slow that shutter down enough to get a hint of motion blur and ambient lighting, but rely on the flash to keep the subject nice and sharp. Some of those scenarios really have been so dark though that I can't actually see well enough to compose a shot very well (I can tell that people are dancing, but can't see expressions, etc) so it really is a "shot in the dark". Thankfully, I still often manage to get some fun expressions and positions. ;)
Everybody has their own style, but for myself I find that all my favorite dark reception hall shots are made with a setup along those lines - and honestly, the wide aperture is more of a hazard than a benefit so I find myself at 4.0 as often as not, because things are moving so fast that getting a razor-thin DOF dialed in exactly where you want it is next to impossible. The off-camera lighting provides the drama and subject isolation that you usually rely on bokeh for.
Even with the high iso capabilities of modern dslr's, I've still found situations (not at weddings) where the f/1.4 on my 50mm and 85mm lenses hasn't quite done the job to my liking.
Really? I have a tough time imagining that situation. If you need f/1.4 and ISO 12800 (any modern DSLR should be able to do this passably) things can be so dark that it becomes difficult to compose a shot because you simply can't see. At that point the camera system is rivaling or exceeding the capability of human night vision. That becomes "good enough" in my book, because even if I could get noiseless, focused images with f/1.2 and ISO 52800, I'd just be pointing and clicking in random directions in a pitch black room.
My wife is a photographer and I'm her second shooter for weddings - we've got Pentax K-5 bodies (APS-C) and yep, a 17-70mm/4.0 is my workhorse, which translates about the same. She tends to use the 16-50mm/2.8, which is decent but honestly her and I both prefer to have a backup body with a prime. The humble 50mm/1.4 actually does really well, I also really love the FA Limited 31mm/1.8 and the 35mm/2.0 (the best $300 we ever spent on photo gear).
I honestly never feel like there's something I want to do in the context of wedding photography that I don't have a lens for... except maybe that Nikon 200mm/2.0. If I had unlimited cash, that one might convince me to switch brands. But even then, a lot of those exotic lenses end up being gimmicky for wedding work - you use it for a shot or two, but it's too specialized for most situations. After getting the basic fast primes and fast-ish zooms, we really just rent specialty lenses here and there but haven't found any worth owning.
Since we actually try to make some money on this endeavor, we are pretty practical about gear choices. Better to have multiple last-gen camera bodies that can take a beating and provide redundancy than the latest whiz-bang camera that will depreciate like crazy. So I imagine we'll make the jump to the K-1 in a year or two, but at that point there will be an investment in longer lenses as well to account for the changeover from cropped sensor. Digital camera bodies became "good enough" for 99% of wedding situations about 3 years ago, so at this point the extra expenditure for upgrades is hard to justify.
Work on your statistics. The study says 90% of vehicle-days could be adequately handled by current electrical vehicles and the supporting infrastructure that's currently in place. Not everybody has equivalent driving habits, so assuming that 10% of the time an electric car "won't work for you" is both misleading and outright wrong.
What's important to understand is that there is a distribution of driving habits, which happen to average out to 90%. There are people for whom 0-10% of vehicle-days could be addressed by an electric car (people who drive long distances as part of their work, for instance), and people for whom that number is 99%-100%. For myself, I haven't driven more than 200 miles in a day for the last few years - I travel, but if I go out of the state I fly. As well, we own two cars in my family, so owning an efficient electric car for commuting and a larger, gasoline powered car for long trips would be a practical way to make sure we still had the road trip capability if we needed it.
The correct conclusion from this article is precisely what it states: for 90% of vehicle-days in the U.S., electric vehicles will do the trick. The fact that the number is so high means a couple of other things - there can't be very many 10% drivers in the population, otherwise it would drag the average down... with an average of 90%, there must be a lot of drivers close to 100% to offset each driver with low numbers. In a population of 10, you would arrive at that 90% average by having 9 drivers at 100% and one driver at 0%.
So, the real lesson here is that for a tiny part of the population, EVs never work. For most of the population, EVs always, or almost always work. This is a simple result of the math, and in fact the expectation would be that a typical, median driver would be happy with an EV > 90% of the time.
So really, the best way to lie to the public is for someone like you to use % incorrectly. Using statistics appropriately is no problem whatsoever.
That might be something different entirely... one early trailer for The Incredibles was almost a short film. It showed Mr. Incredible getting a call on his emergency superhero phone and then struggling to fit his out-of-shape self into his old costume. The scene wasn't in the movie, and it wouldn't have really fit into the plot at all - it just demonstrated the overall theme of the film, and one of the characters.
Or, consider: there was a Deadpool poster that satirically represented the movie as a romantic comedy when in actuality it was a dark comedy/action-adventure, but it was fitting with the character's snarky and prank-oriented disposition.
I'm not sure where you draw the line on presenting films truthfully without significantly constraining the creative freedom allowed in movie advertisements. Trailers are themselves an art form, and sometimes a trailer that doesn't contain a single actual scene from the movie can be extremely effective. Consider also the Deadpool promotional video where he was just laying in front of a fireplace, talking about the movie. Nobody would reasonably expect that such a scene would actually be in the movie.
The DMCA isn't good, but there are lots of farm equipment manufacturers, auto companies, etc that don't sue their customers. The difference between Saab and John Deere in this case is that John Deere is going out of its way to behave in an unethical manner and screw its customers over.
What I'm really arguing against is this subtle subtext that says John Deere's actions are the fault of the government, and that if only the government wasn't around this kind of crap wouldn't be happening. A long history of anti-competitive, anti-consumer behavior by corporations that think they can get away with it says otherwise. Repeal the DMCA, but also create legislation protecting the consumer's right to repair, modify, sell, and otherwise control equipment that they legally purchased.
You should read Charles Stross' "Halting State". Forget data gathering, AR apps can be used to get people to do useful tasks for you, for free! Need someone to scope out a target of interest? Make it an objective in the game for them to take a picture of the area. Need someone to deliver a message or carry information discreetly? Make it part of the game, and give them points when the message is successfully dropped off.
Controlling a popular AR game would allow you to create mobs on demand. This is limited only by the imagination.
No, if the DMCA did not exist, open-market service people couldn't be hauled into court for hacking around whatever DRM Deere were to put on its tractors.
The DMCA doesn't help things, certainly, but nothing is forcing John Deere to abuse the laws and their customers this way. Plenty of unethical corporate behavior can happen even if there isn't a convenient legal framework to take advantage of. My main point is this: a specific piece of law might be contributing to this problem, but that doesn't mean that the solution is deregulation. We've already got a corporation that has demonstrated it will prioritize profit over its customers, and removing regulations, many of which involve consumer protections, isn't the solution. Instead, we need legislation in favor of the consumer, to protect their rights to do what they wish with equipment that they own.
Of course, repealing the DMCA would be a welcome step as well.
The hell are you talking about? Try reading comprehension. The government doesn't prevent anybody from creating a competing business (as evidenced by the fact that there are, in fact, many competitors to John Deere, some of which treat their customers well and make their equipment easy to service). If the government is responsible for anything here, it's that it has failed to hold unethical companies accountable for anti-competitive, anti-consumer practices.
My point is not that competing with John Deere would be easy - it is hard, but not mainly because of anything the government is doing. Sure, the DMCA is shitty, but if it didn't exist John Deere could still design proprietary, closed systems and refuse to sell repair manuals or spare parts. There are lots of corporations out there engaging in similar anti-competitive behavior. What is really needed is better consumer protections that ensure a user's right to modify and repair their belongings regardless of what the corporation wants them to do.
Enforcing that is your choice as a corporation. You don't have to design proprietary, closed equipment and then prosecute those who try to repair it themselves. As evidenced by the fact that there are manufacturers out there that design open, accessible products that are user-friendly and easy to service.
The laws are written in a way that mostly benefits the corporations and largest businesses - they're being given protection from the upstarts that would swing in and provide cheaper/better/faster solutions by the government.
How? Give me an example of how the government is preventing someone new from competing in the tractor business. Because I've started more than one business, and the government barriers amount to about $50 of registration fees and 20 minutes registering the business online. The far bigger barriers are that John Deere has immense brand recognition, distribution and maintenance infrastructure, manufacturing facilities, and who knows how many other advantages that have nothing to do with the government but mean any competitor is going to have to be extraordinarily well funded to make a solid attempt at disruption.
The natural state of a market is that entrenched players have a massive advantage, and can use that massive advantage to keep any competitors from becoming a threat. When you're talking about manufacturing heavy machinery, this isn't something where any schmo off the street can just start selling tractors without licensing BS. The barriers that exist to competing in this industry have nothing to do with government.
Wow... even lending support to someone being fat-shamed will get you a troll mod. Nice, slashdot.
ATK, ULA, Orbital, AR, and many others are struggling to adapt to the new market. The thing is, though, for the purpose of these companies, Newspace basically is SpaceX - in a few years the situation may be different with Blue Origin and others, but currently SpaceX is the one and only company that's actually launching payloads for serious customers.
My point is that what separates Oldspace from Newspace isn't just the COTS, fixed-price model. That's a step in the right direction, but what really sets these new companies apart are their ideology - all the older companies exist primarily to turn a profit, and selling aerospace hardware is how they do it, whereas many of the new companies (or at least SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Planetary Resources) exist primarily to make space accessible to the masses, and profit is a means to that end.
The difference is:
Old Space = "cost plus" contracts - Whoops, we've gone over the budget, but keep paying us until we're done!
New Space = fixed-price contracts - Whoops, our rocket went RUD from a bad strut, now we have to launch another one without you giving us more money!
Slight correction - on fixed price contracts, the contractor doesn't have to pay when a launch fails - that's covered by insurance either way.
The important thing is that on a fixed price, the launch provider gets more profit if they reduce launch costs and schedules. On cost-plus, the provider is incentivized to have cost overruns and schedule slips.
And more important than all of that is that we have ideologically driven billionaires competing to make space cheaper - SpaceX is tremendously affordable (~25% the price of competitors) not just because of COTS, but because Musk is trying to build all the infrastructure for a Mars colony in his lifetime. A more pragmatic company would be 90% of the competitor's price, and would be sitting back and enjoying the profits rather than dumping them all right back into develpment of insanely ambitious new vehicles.
Just wanted to say sorry for the internet douchebags out there giving you shit. It's easy for people who have been thin for life to see it as a discipline issue, but there's lots of research showing that the regularly recommended starvation strategies actually lead to no benefit over time or even weight gain because of the body's permanent decrease in metabolic rates.
For a production run it will be an ASIC, but same principle applies - almost all that functionality could be hardware emulated on a single chip today, very easily.
Statistically speaking, we are currently governed mostly by lawyers. Oh, and the rich. If you are a rich, charismatic lawyer, your future as a politician is bright.
Of course scientists aren't perfectly rational. But do you think they are better at making policy decisions than what we currently have? Or more objective than the topmost 0.1% of the rich who have never depended on a paycheck? Just demanding supporting evidence would be a huge improvement over how policy is currently set: by debates that are little more than an extensive survey of the various logical fallacies, and by forming coalitions of selfish lawmakers who are either getting personal kickbacks or pork for their home district.
Besides, for everybody who is panicking that scientists will lead us to some sort of horror novel society where ethics are forgotten, scientific thinking makes you more moral.
The question isn't whether Tyson's Rationalia would be perfect - it's whether it would be better than our current government which amounts to groupthink among advantaged narcissists. The answer seems pretty clear to me. Let's elect some more scientists and engineers, and let's demand the same burden of proof on policymakers that we expect of middle school science fair projects.