Okay, and? You are free to believe what you choose to believe, but in the United States we have, at least in principle, a separation of religion and government. Our founding documents draw very clearly from John Locke, Montesquieu, and other Enlightenment writers, not from the Christian Bible or any other religious document. I believe the heart of this thread to be about the legality of stem cell research, not a holy war. Reason, not faith, is what this country's laws are founded on. As a result, we should legislate science tempered by ethics, and not legislate morality.
That aside, I think that your answer to the previous poster dodges the question.
From the American Heritage Dictionary:
affirm v. tr
1. To declare positively or firmly; maintain to be true. 2. To support or uphold the validity of; confirm.
Obviously the Christian Bible affirms things in the sense of the first definition. By your post, it affirms that man is imperfect, etc. But the real issue is, in the sense that 'affirm' was being used, does it support the validity of anything? The answer is no, unless you take the truth of the Christian Bible to be axiomatic, which would be an article of faith and not of reason. I personally cannot trust decisions of importance to be handled by a system that requires you to believe in the totality of its truth before it can be used as a source. Quoting scripture to support a position is not self-affirming in the way that logic is, nor can it be.
Oh, and your source on embryonic stem cells is outdated and necessary only for research. True theraputic cloning does not require male oocytes (sperm) since a hollowed out donor egg is injected with different genetic material as described here.
It also all depends on the kind of life you want to lead. You can live quite comfortably before thirty without a family anywhere in the world as long as you're not a whiny or exsessively spoiled. The trick is to not have kids to pay for college for or a strong consumer drive to buy all of the latest things new. Even if you only bought half of your stuff secondhand and didn't cook absolutely every night you could live quite comfortably on a small wage almost anywhere.
I have to say that I like the logo. It meets my one requirement for a good logo, and in spades:
A good logo can be recognizably spraypainted with one template.
In other words, the logo is simple enough that it doesn't require any serious work to put it on things, it can be read from close up or afar, its not overly complicated and it looks unique. And this logo fits that requirement quite nicely.
I also like the placement of the flag, the diag it makes with the text really gives the logo some oomph.
Airports recieve public funding for construction and maintainence, at least in the US, and I'm willing to bet overseas as well. They should make an effort to at least try to serve the public good if they're using public money, and part of that is not blaring CNN 24 hours a day in airport terminals, as they do at Laguardia in New York. The counter assistants also do not have the power to turn them off. If people want the news, they should bring a radio with *them*. My feeling is, the default state of a public area should be silence, and everyone should be free to bring what they want in as long as it isnt distrubing anyone.
People in TV induced comas are known for their lack of situational awareness.
Ah, the classic condescending "you watch TV so I'm smarter than you argument."
The effect of television watching on metabolic rate.(This dosen't seem to want to make a link, you can find it at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=8424001&dopt=Abstract ) It goes down, way down. I've observed what the grandparent poster was talking about very often, by the way, even in very intelligent people: TV grabs your attention in ways that things in real life can't compete with. The light flickering into your eyes, especially with TV with fast cuts (like commercials or any modern station really) actually triggers the same physical response as moving leaves in a jungle would, causing in the long term desensitization to stimulus via prolonged "immediate" stress going unrelieved. The grandparent wasn't implying that TV watchers were stupid, he was talking literally about the coma-like state that people absorbed in a television show enter. In a public place, I'm not talking about in a bar or anything here, I think that that's beyond the bounds of good taste.
...bills, billboards and placards...I am sorry but your "freedom from distracting television" is not as important as others freedom of expression.
Commercial speech != person expression. Let me give you an example. At a memorial, it's acceptable to leave flowers or a message, but it's unacceptable to post up advertising for your business just because you know that there will be a lot of people to see it. Corproations get away with it because we've given them rights as a person, and as a result they demand freedom of speech, even for commercial purposes.
Egoism is the ultimate morality: it is forced , faked, altruism that is the root of evil.
If there were unlimited resources, or life was some zero sum game, I might be able to even consent to your position. The truth is, there are limited resources in the world. Self-serving ideals in the end result in massive quality of life failures for future generations and poor people, regardless of if they're in a first or third world nation. The playing field isn't anywhere near level. Egotistic economic policies are nothing but the rich trading among themselves at the expense of the rest of the world.
And no, the markets aren't going to account for environmental accountability. The markets are blind. True free, egotistic markets have a major, major flaw: free markets require transparent flow of information, but it is beneficial for some people to hide or distort information from the market.
If the government serves the vast majority of the people instead of just supporting the very wealthy, the altruism isn't fake, it's providing for the common good.
In some respects I'd like to see them stay in power a while longer. It may reawaken the sedated America public to realize their government does manner and it can turn totalitarian thanks to American indifference. it may be the only way the American people will throw off the yoke thats been laid on them by a wealthy elite and giant corporations
First the American public would have to stop listening to the corporate media defining what is and isn't American anymore. Americanism is run like a brand; it's so deeply ingrained, Americans would continue to believe that their system was flawless even in the face of widespread totalitarianism... especially because the government would be telling them that they were not a totalitarian regime. You could probably compare this to Nike; even if Nike started making bad sneakers, their image is so ingrained into society that the brand loyalists would keep buying anyway.
1024 * 768 = 786432 786432 * 60 (Hz) = 47185920 or about 50 megabytes per second. Sure, you can compress it VNC style, but it's never going to work for a fulltime monitor display. On the other hand, I am not a computer graphics engineer, so I could very well be off here, but I don't think I am.
Read the post a few pages up, from the optical researcher. The reporter didn't do their homework-- you already can track where a person is looking based on the plane of their eye and position of their iris to better than 1 degree with off-the-shelf components and software. Think about how much more efficient it is computationally to just track where they are looking and compare it to a map of the screen than it is to read the vision out of their eyes and compare it to a map of the screen. This technology may have useful purposes, but helping quadrepelegics doesn't seem to be one of them.
I'll bite. You're missing the point. It's not that it's less than 100% effective. It's that it actually makes the problem worse by making them need more cocaine.
Abolish one single presidency and instate a council of several leaders. We could call it a 'cabinet'. Give each of the cabinet members a say over one particular part of policy, say one for the economy, one for foreign relations, one for internal politics, one for offense and one for defense, just as some examples. End the use of political parties by moving from a running for election which is very costly ($186 million so far and counting) compared to standing for election, the system I believe is used is a lot of parlimenatry governments.
In standing for election, the campaigning time is reduced from the US time of four years for the president, six for a senator, and two for a representative (for those outside the US, that's their entire term) to only one or two months before the election. Instead of 'running' for election, going from place to place, the candiates 'stand' by publishing their position papers in newspapers. There is a rebuttal published from other parties. The candidate then responds to the rebuttals. No more fearmongering, years of campaigning, and vauge promises. Everything that the candidate stands for is in black and white. Everything that all candidates say is picked apart by the others. Those who don't care to read about what's going on in their government or the positions of various candidates don't have the chance to be persuaded by flashy PR campaigns and probably just don't vote. Overnight, you eliminate the uninformed voter. Suddenly small candidates can run without hundreds of millions of dollars in donations. Ultimately, although not immediately, parties can become unnecessary. Money looses it's importance in politics. The system works because it utilizes, instead of ignores, people's appetite for power. If they want to remain in power, they have only one duty to do faithfully (serve only the people for only the one task that they have been elected to do), instead of many different roles, as the presiednt does now, compounded by many different influences.
It has some obvious gaps, such as figuring out how to narrow down the number of candidates for each particular cabinet post without relying on parties, although a gradual phase out over time might be able to accomplish that, if there was a strict, unalterable timeline.
Run for congress? Good luck getting the financial support necessary to run for elected office these days unless you already toe the line. So, either one is
a) independently wealthy, b) in agreemnent with both a major political party and the special interest groups that support them, or c) not running for office, not as a serious challenge anyway.
Not to mention that you can't get coverage to disseminate your opninions to the voters unless the media considers you a 'mainstream' canidate; even Kucinich, who ran with a major party, was ridiculed by the mainstream press for running for President with wildly divergent viewpoints. The next time a newspaper at even the county level gives a serious look at a third party canidate, do me a favor and email it to me. I'll put it next to my unicorn and Red Sox 2005 World Series trophy.
A few years ago, I was in to Baldur's Gate in a big way. For a week, I played the game from start to finish. When I was called to dinner by my parents right as I was psyching myself up for the final battle, I forgot to leave the game baggage behind. A few minutes in to dinner, I remember twitching my 'space-bar' thumb (pause in Baldur's Gate) to get up and use the bathroom, and being shocked for a few seconds that reality continued. It was a freaky expierience. I've never allowed myself to get that much into a game since.
> Seriously, I would rather have not one child be sexually abused for losing one of those "inaliable rights" everyone loves.
Woah woah woah, you're making a BIG leap here. British Telecom is talking about banning websites that show child pornography, which is NOT the same thing as stopping the child pornography from ever being made. Child porn isn't like, say, deordorant. Without a large enough market to justify the sale of deodorant, people wouldn't make it. It's cost prohibitive. Child porn, however, has intrinsic value for the people who make it. There isn't really any profit motive in making kiddie porn. This issue is totally distinct from any other illegal item because the act itself involves things which are already in existance and cannot be regulated, namely adults with an appetite for children and children. It isn't like marijuana or alchohol where you can find the plants or bottles and distroy them.
What you're suggesting is an economic solution to a sociological and psychological problem. It's not as easy or as simple, but the only solution to a sociological/psychological problem is a sociological/psychological solutuion. I don't know what it would be, I'm not a psychologist or a member of a think tank with a lot of time to devote to the issue, but I'm sure as hell there's a better solution that the one that BT is proposing.
To review:
understanding of economics = good desire for a quick fix instead of a solution to a complex problem = bad, and way to frequent these days.
Indeed, you can just be trigger-happy and take multiple shots and just use the best of what comes out.
Not true at all. Better to take the time to get the one shot you want right the first time, and *really* take the time to set up the shot. Most of the time with digital, you'll say to yourself "eh, I don't need to make sure the lighting/angle/focus/subject placement/etc is okay, I can just snap a thousand photos and pick the best one. Digital photography leads to laziness; printing, especially in a darkroom, leads to conservation, and thus maximization of resources, in my opinion anyway.
and will be put on to some CDRs (or even DVD-Rs) when I've taken enough of them.
Many CD-Rs fail in as few as twenty months; and even the best CD-R written and kept archivally (slow write, kept in good humidity, pressure, etc) won't last more than 50 years, whereas properly developed and fixd slide film will easily last twice that.
Or, for 1/5 the cost of a 6 megapixel digital camera (~$1200), or between $200 and $400 you can build a fully stocked darkroom in your house. I just finished mine, took me about 30 man-hours; it's light proof, it's got ventilation, and it's got electricity. The sheer amount of control over exposure with an enlarger simply cannot be matched by Photoshop. Factor in the cost of a computer decent enough to actually really make good use of Photoshop, and you can build a color darkroom. Even with "good glass," you could always "work the eBay" a 20 year old used camera; three years from now when you want to upgrade your digital, you'll know where the real savings are.
Sure, PS can do amazing/gimmicks/ but for those of us who still think that the picture itself is more important than how you can manipulate it, *especially* with B&W, Photoshop simply cannot come close. Maybe, *maybe* someday if there is an 11x14ish box that you can create that I can use my hands, my fingers, paper, cellophane, etc etc to do the changes in Photoshop like I can with an enlarger, you would have something.
One other thing that nobody is talking about is the disconnection with the picture you have with digital. With film, it's all about light; it's more pure. The chemical process makes it closer to recreating reality when you print than just loading it onto the computer, cut, paste, etc.
As a reformed digital junkie, I'd also like to point out that the 35/36 shots are bad per roll is only exacerbated by digital. When you can take 200 shots, and you never have to worry about the impact of them, you're not going to give each shot the TLC it deserves, and when there's that once in a lifetime shot you'll miss it; digital is successive approximation usually, which won't do you any good if that helicopter already crashed/person was gorged by an elephant/first kiss/street shot/etc. When you can build a CCD into every molecule, then we'll talk.
are all driving in a car to a conference when the car brakes fail. They plummet down the hill, and crash into the trees. First, the manager speaks. He says, "We need to make a comittee, figure out what went wrong, decide on a course of action." "No, no," says the engineer, "we need to open up the hood, check the engine, oil, etc." To which the computer programmer responds, "Why don't we just push it up the hill and try again?"
My guess would be asthetics. The human eye travels left to right, and to balance the white space of the upper left quadrants you need something. Now, I don't know, maybe there are other gliders that are more asthetically pleasing, but this one seems to fit all of the right 'rules'.
With that aside, yeah it'd be a fun thing to stick into a document with o's but I think its doomed to 31337ness, at least as a public symbol. Now, if he had kept it private and just used it to sign documents, that would be cool.
Scientific American had an interesting article (the begining of which is reproduced here. Basically, two charged plates are on either side of an elastic material. Provide a current, and it compresses... compress it and it provides current! Apparently the US Army is interested in turning the tech into portable generators for their 'soldiers of the future'.
Pizeoelectric devices would work the same way; deform them and they generate electricity.
Solid-state approaches also would make production easier... none of it has to be waterproof. You could probably even convert a good pair of running shoes no problem.
I suggest you pick up a copy of James Gleick's Chaos.
The interesting thing is that, basically, truly simple rules can create unpredictable behavior. Introspection can have nothing to do with it; free will could simply result from a non-linear dynamic, creating completely unpredictable in a single instant but verifiable over a long term (we know that in an hour, a hot drink and a cold drink will have mixed, but at the ten minute mark it's anybody's guess how much of that process is done). Fascinating stuff, and I am not a cognitive scientist, but in all likelihood chaos is necessary to create real creative intelligence, imho.
Every single school assignment for the first semester of English, be it American or European history, if its in english and theres a book on it, its probably in the public domain. Lots easier to cut and paste that way for block quotes.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, and? You are free to believe what you choose to believe, but in the United States we have, at least in principle, a separation of religion and government. Our founding documents draw very clearly from John Locke, Montesquieu, and other Enlightenment writers, not from the Christian Bible or any other religious document. I believe the heart of this thread to be about the legality of stem cell research, not a holy war. Reason, not faith, is what this country's laws are founded on. As a result, we should legislate science tempered by ethics, and not legislate morality.
That aside, I think that your answer to the previous poster dodges the question.
From the American Heritage Dictionary:
affirm
v. tr
1. To declare positively or firmly; maintain to be true.
2. To support or uphold the validity of; confirm.
Obviously the Christian Bible affirms things in the sense of the first definition. By your post, it affirms that man is imperfect, etc. But the real issue is, in the sense that 'affirm' was being used, does it support the validity of anything? The answer is no, unless you take the truth of the Christian Bible to be axiomatic, which would be an article of faith and not of reason. I personally cannot trust decisions of importance to be handled by a system that requires you to believe in the totality of its truth before it can be used as a source. Quoting scripture to support a position is not self-affirming in the way that logic is, nor can it be.
Oh, and your source on embryonic stem cells is outdated and necessary only for research. True theraputic cloning does not require male oocytes (sperm) since a hollowed out donor egg is injected with different genetic material as described here.
It also all depends on the kind of life you want to lead. You can live quite comfortably before thirty without a family anywhere in the world as long as you're not a whiny or exsessively spoiled. The trick is to not have kids to pay for college for or a strong consumer drive to buy all of the latest things new. Even if you only bought half of your stuff secondhand and didn't cook absolutely every night you could live quite comfortably on a small wage almost anywhere.
I have to say that I like the logo. It meets my one requirement for a good logo, and in spades:
A good logo can be recognizably spraypainted with one template.
In other words, the logo is simple enough that it doesn't require any serious work to put it on things, it can be read from close up or afar, its not overly complicated and it looks unique. And this logo fits that requirement quite nicely.
I also like the placement of the flag, the diag it makes with the text really gives the logo some oomph.
It's their damned airport.
= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=8424001&dopt=Abstract ) It goes down, way down. I've observed what the grandparent poster was talking about very often, by the way, even in very intelligent people: TV grabs your attention in ways that things in real life can't compete with. The light flickering into your eyes, especially with TV with fast cuts (like commercials or any modern station really) actually triggers the same physical response as moving leaves in a jungle would, causing in the long term desensitization to stimulus via prolonged "immediate" stress going unrelieved. The grandparent wasn't implying that TV watchers were stupid, he was talking literally about the coma-like state that people absorbed in a television show enter. In a public place, I'm not talking about in a bar or anything here, I think that that's beyond the bounds of good taste.
Airports recieve public funding for construction and maintainence, at least in the US, and I'm willing to bet overseas as well. They should make an effort to at least try to serve the public good if they're using public money, and part of that is not blaring CNN 24 hours a day in airport terminals, as they do at Laguardia in New York. The counter assistants also do not have the power to turn them off. If people want the news, they should bring a radio with *them*. My feeling is, the default state of a public area should be silence, and everyone should be free to bring what they want in as long as it isnt distrubing anyone.
People in TV induced comas are known for their lack of situational awareness.
Ah, the classic condescending "you watch TV so I'm smarter than you argument."
The effect of television watching on metabolic rate.(This dosen't seem to want to make a link, you can find it at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd
Commercial speech != person expression. Let me give you an example. At a memorial, it's acceptable to leave flowers or a message, but it's unacceptable to post up advertising for your business just because you know that there will be a lot of people to see it. Corproations get away with it because we've given them rights as a person, and as a result they demand freedom of speech, even for commercial purposes.
If there were unlimited resources, or life was some zero sum game, I might be able to even consent to your position. The truth is, there are limited resources in the world. Self-serving ideals in the end result in massive quality of life failures for future generations and poor people, regardless of if they're in a first or third world nation. The playing field isn't anywhere near level. Egotistic economic policies are nothing but the rich trading among themselves at the expense of the rest of the world.
And no, the markets aren't going to account for environmental accountability. The markets are blind. True free, egotistic markets have a major, major flaw: free markets require transparent flow of information, but it is beneficial for some people to hide or distort information from the market.
If the government serves the vast majority of the people instead of just supporting the very wealthy, the altruism isn't fake, it's providing for the common good.
First the American public would have to stop listening to the corporate media defining what is and isn't American anymore. Americanism is run like a brand; it's so deeply ingrained, Americans would continue to believe that their system was flawless even in the face of widespread totalitarianism... especially because the government would be telling them that they were not a totalitarian regime. You could probably compare this to Nike; even if Nike started making bad sneakers, their image is so ingrained into society that the brand loyalists would keep buying anyway.
I wish I shared your optimism.
Math time.
1024 * 768 = 786432
786432 * 60 (Hz) = 47185920
or about 50 megabytes per second. Sure, you can compress it VNC style, but it's never going to work for a fulltime monitor display. On the other hand, I am not a computer graphics engineer, so I could very well be off here, but I don't think I am.
Read the post a few pages up, from the optical researcher. The reporter didn't do their homework-- you already can track where a person is looking based on the plane of their eye and position of their iris to better than 1 degree with off-the-shelf components and software. Think about how much more efficient it is computationally to just track where they are looking and compare it to a map of the screen than it is to read the vision out of their eyes and compare it to a map of the screen. This technology may have useful purposes, but helping quadrepelegics doesn't seem to be one of them.
I'll bite. You're missing the point. It's not that it's less than 100% effective. It's that it actually makes the problem worse by making them need more cocaine.
Abolish one single presidency and instate a council of several leaders. We could call it a 'cabinet'. Give each of the cabinet members a say over one particular part of policy, say one for the economy, one for foreign relations, one for internal politics, one for offense and one for defense, just as some examples. End the use of political parties by moving from a running for election which is very costly ($186 million so far and counting) compared to standing for election, the system I believe is used is a lot of parlimenatry governments.
In standing for election, the campaigning time is reduced from the US time of four years for the president, six for a senator, and two for a representative (for those outside the US, that's their entire term) to only one or two months before the election. Instead of 'running' for election, going from place to place, the candiates 'stand' by publishing their position papers in newspapers. There is a rebuttal published from other parties. The candidate then responds to the rebuttals. No more fearmongering, years of campaigning, and vauge promises. Everything that the candidate stands for is in black and white. Everything that all candidates say is picked apart by the others. Those who don't care to read about what's going on in their government or the positions of various candidates don't have the chance to be persuaded by flashy PR campaigns and probably just don't vote. Overnight, you eliminate the uninformed voter. Suddenly small candidates can run without hundreds of millions of dollars in donations. Ultimately, although not immediately, parties can become unnecessary. Money looses it's importance in politics. The system works because it utilizes, instead of ignores, people's appetite for power. If they want to remain in power, they have only one duty to do faithfully (serve only the people for only the one task that they have been elected to do), instead of many different roles, as the presiednt does now, compounded by many different influences.
It has some obvious gaps, such as figuring out how to narrow down the number of candidates for each particular cabinet post without relying on parties, although a gradual phase out over time might be able to accomplish that, if there was a strict, unalterable timeline.
Maybe I should write a pamphlet or something?
Run for congress? Good luck getting the financial support necessary to run for elected office these days unless you already toe the line. So, either one is
a) independently wealthy,
b) in agreemnent with both a major political party and the special interest groups that support them,
or c) not running for office, not as a serious challenge anyway.
Not to mention that you can't get coverage to disseminate your opninions to the voters unless the media considers you a 'mainstream' canidate; even Kucinich, who ran with a major party, was ridiculed by the mainstream press for running for President with wildly divergent viewpoints. The next time a newspaper at even the county level gives a serious look at a third party canidate, do me a favor and email it to me. I'll put it next to my unicorn and Red Sox 2005 World Series trophy.
I know exactly what you mean.
A few years ago, I was in to Baldur's Gate in a big way. For a week, I played the game from start to finish. When I was called to dinner by my parents right as I was psyching myself up for the final battle, I forgot to leave the game baggage behind. A few minutes in to dinner, I remember twitching my 'space-bar' thumb (pause in Baldur's Gate) to get up and use the bathroom, and being shocked for a few seconds that reality continued. It was a freaky expierience. I've never allowed myself to get that much into a game since.
> Seriously, I would rather have not one child be sexually abused for losing one of those "inaliable rights" everyone loves.
Woah woah woah, you're making a BIG leap here. British Telecom is talking about banning websites that show child pornography, which is NOT the same thing as stopping the child pornography from ever being made. Child porn isn't like, say, deordorant. Without a large enough market to justify the sale of deodorant, people wouldn't make it. It's cost prohibitive. Child porn, however, has intrinsic value for the people who make it. There isn't really any profit motive in making kiddie porn. This issue is totally distinct from any other illegal item because the act itself involves things which are already in existance and cannot be regulated, namely adults with an appetite for children and children. It isn't like marijuana or alchohol where you can find the plants or bottles and distroy them.
What you're suggesting is an economic solution to a sociological and psychological problem. It's not as easy or as simple, but the only solution to a sociological/psychological problem is a sociological/psychological solutuion. I don't know what it would be, I'm not a psychologist or a member of a think tank with a lot of time to devote to the issue, but I'm sure as hell there's a better solution that the one that BT is proposing.
To review:
understanding of economics = good
desire for a quick fix instead of a solution to a complex problem = bad, and way to frequent these days.
Not true at all. Better to take the time to get the one shot you want right the first time, and *really* take the time to set up the shot. Most of the time with digital, you'll say to yourself "eh, I don't need to make sure the lighting/angle/focus/subject placement/etc is okay, I can just snap a thousand photos and pick the best one. Digital photography leads to laziness; printing, especially in a darkroom, leads to conservation, and thus maximization of resources, in my opinion anyway.
Many CD-Rs fail in as few as twenty months; and even the best CD-R written and kept archivally (slow write, kept in good humidity, pressure, etc) won't last more than 50 years, whereas properly developed and fixd slide film will easily last twice that.
a vegetarian you insensitive clod!
Or maybe it would be more damaging if she was? (pun, also intended)
Or, for 1/5 the cost of a 6 megapixel digital camera (~$1200), or between $200 and $400 you can build a fully stocked darkroom in your house. I just finished mine, took me about 30 man-hours; it's light proof, it's got ventilation, and it's got electricity. The sheer amount of control over exposure with an enlarger simply cannot be matched by Photoshop. Factor in the cost of a computer decent enough to actually really make good use of Photoshop, and you can build a color darkroom. Even with "good glass," you could always "work the eBay" a 20 year old used camera; three years from now when you want to upgrade your digital, you'll know where the real savings are.
/gimmicks/ but for those of us who still think that the picture itself is more important than how you can manipulate it, *especially* with B&W, Photoshop simply cannot come close. Maybe, *maybe* someday if there is an 11x14ish box that you can create that I can use my hands, my fingers, paper, cellophane, etc etc to do the changes in Photoshop like I can with an enlarger, you would have something.
Sure, PS can do amazing
One other thing that nobody is talking about is the disconnection with the picture you have with digital. With film, it's all about light; it's more pure. The chemical process makes it closer to recreating reality when you print than just loading it onto the computer, cut, paste, etc.
As a reformed digital junkie, I'd also like to point out that the 35/36 shots are bad per roll is only exacerbated by digital. When you can take 200 shots, and you never have to worry about the impact of them, you're not going to give each shot the TLC it deserves, and when there's that once in a lifetime shot you'll miss it; digital is successive approximation usually, which won't do you any good if that helicopter already crashed/person was gorged by an elephant/first kiss/street shot/etc. When you can build a CCD into every molecule, then we'll talk.
are all driving in a car to a conference when the car brakes fail. They plummet down the hill, and crash into the trees. First, the manager speaks. He says, "We need to make a comittee, figure out what went wrong, decide on a course of action." "No, no," says the engineer, "we need to open up the hood, check the engine, oil, etc." To which the computer programmer responds, "Why don't we just push it up the hill and try again?"
My guess would be asthetics. The human eye travels left to right, and to balance the white space of the upper left quadrants you need something. Now, I don't know, maybe there are other gliders that are more asthetically pleasing, but this one seems to fit all of the right 'rules'.
With that aside, yeah it'd be a fun thing to stick into a document with o's but I think its doomed to 31337ness, at least as a public symbol. Now, if he had kept it private and just used it to sign documents, that would be cool.
D10? Do you mean the Canon 10D?
Focus ring. Not all digital SLRs have them, but no digital consumers have them. It's one of the great features missing in my opinion.
I like my coffe like I like my women,
cold and bitter.
Scientific American had an interesting article (the begining of which is reproduced here. Basically, two charged plates are on either side of an elastic material. Provide a current, and it compresses... compress it and it provides current! Apparently the US Army is interested in turning the tech into portable generators for their 'soldiers of the future'.
Pizeoelectric devices would work the same way; deform them and they generate electricity.
Solid-state approaches also would make production easier... none of it has to be waterproof. You could probably even convert a good pair of running shoes no problem.
I suggest you pick up a copy of James Gleick's Chaos.
The interesting thing is that, basically, truly simple rules can create unpredictable behavior. Introspection can have nothing to do with it; free will could simply result from a non-linear dynamic, creating completely unpredictable in a single instant but verifiable over a long term (we know that in an hour, a hot drink and a cold drink will have mixed, but at the ten minute mark it's anybody's guess how much of that process is done). Fascinating stuff, and I am not a cognitive scientist, but in all likelihood chaos is necessary to create real creative intelligence, imho.
Every single school assignment for the first semester of English, be it American or European history, if its in english and theres a book on it, its probably in the public domain. Lots easier to cut and paste that way for block quotes.