I think that besides size, weight, etc., one of the considerations is what happens if something goes wrong and Huygens crashes on Titan with an RTG aboard? It would be like setting off a dirty bomb there - contaminating the place with all sorts of radiation that could probably ruin future missions and might piss off the odd Titanian or two that might be living there.
Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth shattering kaboom!
From the looks of it, the scramjet engine doesn't appear to be a very sophisticated device. It's just a funnel...
Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, it really doesn't have any moving parts, but designing it properly is an extremily complex undertaking. I believe engineers have compared it to trying to keep a match lit in the middle of a hurricane.
While the thermal issues are no doubt complex, that sort of problem has been tackled before (the space shuttle far exceeds Mach 10 during re-entry, for example).
Ok, I'm curious about people's experiences. If you work for a large company, and especially if you're "Joe IT Worker", a non-manager sys admin or programmer type, have you ever done anything that has, up or down, influenced the price of your company's stock in any meaningful way?
I've been at my (quite large) company a long time, at times I've been a stellar performer (and my performance reviews have indicated as such), and at other times I've been so-so. Through it all, I highly doubt that I've ever, ever, done anything (or ever had the opportunity to do something) to influence the stock price of the company even one penny up or down.
At the same time, I've seen plenty of examples where the company stock price benifited, or was the victim of, market whims, regional economics, good or bad luck, questionable decisions by upper management, etc.
So, I can see large company's giving stock options to lower level IT types as a way to retain employees, but do these company's really think that options are going to influence this type of employee into being a better performer? Are employees at these types of companies really gullible enough to think that they can make a difference?
Say that 1 million people pirate windows. Now suppose based on Windows increased popularity, 100,000 people buy windows and another 200,000 pirate it. That's 100,000 copies of windows sold (money in MS's pocket), AND 1.3 million machines that AREN't using Linux. Plus these new 300,000 users further increase windows popularity, leading to more pirating / buying of windows and non-use of Linux. MS supresses the competition and still makes money. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Indeed. Even if Bush loses I've been demoralized by the amount of support he still enjoys. It may be below 50% but in my mind that's far too high.
Maybe I'm nuts, but I think much of Bush's support comes from people for whom Iraq is not the number one issue - rather religious / social views are the number one issues to these folks, who, right or wrong, are aligned much more closely with Bush's conservative views than they are with Kerry's views. I'm sure that there's some polls out there to confirm or deny this, but I'm simply too lazy to go and hunt them down right now.
Hmmm, and if you indicated to your friend that you'd like him to say that he likes how the car looks, or you pressure him to say that, and go tell your wife what your friend said, that doesn't make you a liar, but it hardly seems like something on the up-and-up.
Considering that at least some of the intel analysts (according to the NYT article) indicated that they felt pressure to give a certain view, I'd say that the above analogy applies.
Oh, and lies of omission are still lies. Not telling someone that you coerced the advice you are basing your recommendations on is a clear lie of omission.
So, a president lying under oath about sex is worse, in your mind, than, say, a president lying to our soldiers, their parents, and the American people about why he's risking their lives, why he's risking the credibility and prestige of the United States, not to mention why he's risking all of the other potentially negative consequences of going to war?
Now, granted, Bush, Cheney, and Co. were not technically under oath to tell the truth when they made all of their assorted 'statements of fact' to all of us, but I submit that for men in their positions, telling the truth about such matters ought to be for them a matter of honor, a matter of doing what's right and far more important than whether or not they're under oath at the time.
If the president lying about such things is not an 'impeachable offense', it certainly ought to be, and I can't help but wonder what would be going on right now if Congress were controlled by the other party.
First, gotta love section 1, that asks that the bill be referred to as the "Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation Act of 2004". The bill has absolutely nothing to do with the exploitation of children, but who would vote against a bill whose title suggests that if you do vote for it you will be helping to prevent the exploitation of children.
In response, I suggest that we on/. start a campaign to remove Senator Hatch from office entitled "Corporate Lobbying Devolves into Blatant Deception and Exploitation of the American Consumer, Voter and Tax Payer Recall Campaign". We can start by gathering a large group of child exploitation victims to meet with Senator Hatch in his office to ask him why he is trivializing their experiences.
If this bill passes, then the following seems likely to occur:
Xerox, RIP. Kinkos, RIP. Makers of video and audio recording devices, like CD / DVD burners, TIVO, etc, RIP.
Hey, maybe even the manufacturing of DVD / CD pressing equipment and film duplication equipment will be illegal under this bill. And how do the RIAA and MPAA geniuses propose to continue in business once that occurs?
If nothing else, I'll love to see the entertainment parts of Sony try and sue the electronics manufacturing parts of Sony out of existence.
Just out of curiousity, wasn't turning Casini's antenna dish towards the direction of travel as a shield against hitting anything pretty futile? At 60,000+ KPH, isn't the energy involved in hitting anything much bigger than a spec of dust (and even that) going to pretty much be disasterous? We saw that foam at 500 mph can pucnch holes in reinforced carbon-carbon. A pebble (much less mass, but much, much more speed) at 60,000 kph seems like it would ruin Cassini.
I honestly used to get scared to death from the sound playing Wolfenstein 3D - coming through a door to find one of those sub-machine gun toting SS guys and his yell when he saw you used to always cause me to jump in my chair.
But that was nothing as compared with the original Doom - preparing to go through a door took a lot of prayer and the sounds of the monsters when they saw you could almost frighten me into another dimension.
Wow, I can't believe that it was only 8 years ago. When the original Quake was released, I honestly wasn't that impressed by it. Perhaps that's because I never had such hot hardware to run it on. But, mostly I remember thinking that the main way in which Quake, as a gaming engine, improved on Doom / Doom 2 (which I really loved) was by providing a true 3D environment, as opposed to Doom's psuedo-3D. Yet, to me, Doom was so well done in terms of level design, etc, that all Quake did was make me aware of things that Doom did not do, but that I had never missed in Doom as I never really realised that Doom wasn't doing them.
Lets see... my CPU, my hard drive space, my electricity - what do my means have to do with their freedom of speech?
I mean, newspapers have the right to deny paid advertising if they feel it is innappropriate etc., even though this might infringe on the potential advertiser's freedom of speech. Clearly, the newspapers cannot be forced to use their facilities or equipment to facilitate someone else's freedom of speech - why should I be forced to use my computer to do so, and more so, why should I be forced to do so without compensation?
In conclusion, to adequately excercise my own freedom of speech, I'd just like to say that me thinks that this judge has a bad case of, to use the legal term, headus upus assus.
The main advantage for your style of shooting of going to a 3 or 4 MP camera is that you would be able to salvage more of those shots that were almost good, except for all the extraneous garbage, by cropping away up to 75% of the original image and still end up with a photorealistic 4x5 print.
Exactly! I think 2 or 3 MP is probably enough if you framed the shot perfectly. But if you didn't and you want to crop it, and you still want a decent amount of pixels in the resulting crop (especially if you want to print the resulting crop), starting with 2 or 3 megapixels in the original image is probably not going to be enough for a lot of situations.
Say you took the exact same photo with two cameras. I'll use the Nikon D70 dSLR as one example - it produces 6.1 MP images (3008x2000). I'll use a hypothetical 3MP camera as another example (for purposes of this example, I want both cameras to have the same ~ 3:2 aspect ratio so that I'm comparing apples to apples. Even though most digicams do not have that aspect ratio, the point remains the same) that takes images at 2132*1424. Crop 10% off each edge of the image. On the Nikon you're left with an image roughly 2400x1400, ~ 3.3 megapixels. Do the same thing on the 3MP camera and you're left with 1706x1104, roughly 1.9 megapixels. Start with a 2 megapixel camera and you'll be left with even less.
So, the point is, if you're going to be doing any serious cropping of your images, a 2 or 3MP digicam is probably not going to leave you with enough pixels to be able to make decent prints if we figure that the final image we're printing needs 2 or 3MP to look good.
I think POV-Ray produces great output, however I would imagine that for professionals, it is probably not very good from the standpoint that, compared to commercial ray tracers, the time that must be invested to obtain a given output is probably much greater, typically, than for a commercial package. Still, images like this and this and even this inspire me to still tinker around with it.
Heck, POV-Ray was what inspired me (way back) to upgrade from that 386DX-33 to the 486DX2-66 with a 2 meg Diamond Viper VESA card so I could display 800x600 in 24 bit(!):) I also love the fact that, as opposed to most other (triangle / polygon based) renderers, POV-Ray's primitives are perfect shapes (i.e. a sphere in POV-Ray is a perfect sphere, not some sort of polygon based construct with Gourad shading) unless of course you intentionally build up objects from its triangle primitive.
"You go for the special effects and the story line."
Well, that there sums up the problems with the first two films in the new trilogy - a) absolutely horrible story lines and b) while the special effects have been great, they definetly do not give you the "wow" factor that the original trilogy's effects did. The effects were great, and in some way ground breaking due to their quantity, but I don't think in the first two films there have been any shots at all that had people's jaws on the floor as was the case with the first trilogy.
"...And I bet I'll still see you guys in line for episode 3 tickets."
If the producers of Gigli had paid off Lucas so that they could retitle their film Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Bennifer that film would have grossed $300 million at the domestic box office. Its Star Wars - no matter how badly Lucas screws it up, simply because of the fact that its a Star Wars movie it will gross several hundred million and be a huge success anyway.
My take is this - walk into a bank, a museum, or a host of other public places and you are being tracked anyway, by security cameras and the like. No one is asking you to consent. If you post some signs to make it clear to the hikers that these monitoring devices are in place and by hiking these trails they consent to such monitoring, you ought to be ok, I would think.
In a lot of communities, run the wrong red light and get a free 8x10 of you and your car for your troubles.
There is also the issue, for CCD's anyway, of charge bleeding from one site to another. That effect will increase as the pixel density and light-gathering increases. But again I don't know if it's an important effect in practice.
I think on the D70 you can observe charge bleeding if you try to shoot directly (or nearly directly) into the sun. Here is an example. I imagine this would probably occur on most CCD based cameras.
Unfortunately I don't know of any "regular" CCD cameras that give you more than 8 bits per color channel.
Actually, as far as Nikon goes, all of their CCD based dSLR's capture 12 bpp per color channel, the D70 included. But, you will only get this data out of the camera when you shoot in RAW format. Shoot JPEG and the data is lost as you're limitted to 8bpp with JPEG. I *think* Canon's dSLR's, including the Digital Rebel, can also do this - of course they are not CCD based but CMOS based.
I thought that CCD chips were something like 50 times more sensitive to light than film.
Not sure about this. I know on a D70, the minimum ISO is 200. This means that taking into account the filters placed over the CCD, the sensitivity of the sensor is roughly equivelant to ISO 200 film. At higher ISO's you aren't making the sensor more sensitive, you are actually just amplifying its base ISO 200 signal which is why more noise is apparent in the resulting picture. In any case, I know that some CCD based cameras start at ISO 50, so to a large degree it probably largely depends on the strength of the filters being used, but this is a topic that I really don't know that much about.
A smaller sensor does mean a smaller lens (everything else being equal).
A lens designed for a 35mm film camera will project a focused image onto the film plane. The image will be circular. The rectangle of the 35mm film frame that you are exposing will barely fit within the circle (i.e. the corners of the film frame will just be touching the edge of the circle).
On a dSLR, like the Nikon D70 (referenced in the article), the sensor is smaller than the film frame of the 35 mm camera, and as a result the sensor fits more easily into the boundaries of the image circle formed by the lens.
Because of this, the effective field of view changes. The area of the D70's sensor is roughly 2/3 that of a 35mm film frame. As a result, the D70's "crop factor", or its "focal length multiplier", is around 1.5x. Attach a 50mm lens to the D70 and the field of view captured by its sensor will be roughly equal to that which a 35mm camera would capture using a 75mm lens, because the D70 is only capturing a smaller area of the image.
Clearly, there is less light hitting the D70's sensor with the same lens / same aperature as compared to a 35mm film frame. However, the density of the light falling on the D70's sensor with the same lens at the same aperature is exactly the same as the light falling on the film in a 35mm camera. The difference is that the D70's sensor is gathering less of the lens's total image. Take a shot at f2.8 on the D70 set to ISO 200, and you should get the same exposure as the same shot at f2.8 on the 35mm camera with ISO 200 film, since the density of the light striking the sensor / film is the same in both cases.
What is most interesting is that lenses tend to produce more distortion toward the boundary of the image circle (i.e., at the corners of a 35mm photo). On the D70, using a normal 35mm lense, the image is captured from the center of the image circle, resulting in less distortion from the lens.
At the same time, Nikon has produced lenses specifically designed for the D70's sensor size. These lenses are smaller than the equivelant lens for a 35mm camera. The reason? These lenses only need to produce a smaller image circle than a 35mm lens, one that barely encompasses the sensor size of the D70 (and would not fully encompass the 35mm film frame). They are only capturing the light necessary to create an image circle of that size. Therefore, the outer edges of the lens elements that would be needed if the lens were made for a 35mm camera can be discarded, resulting in a smaller, lighter lens.
Larger photo sites do require more light than a smaller photo site to achieve the same exposure. But again, it is the density of the light that evens the playing field. A photoreceptor site of 4 nm^2 will gather 4 times the light of a 1 nm^2 photoreceptor site. Suppose a maximum of 250,000 photons are collected by the 1 nm^2 photoreceptor, and the 4 nm^2 site collects a maximum 1,000,000. Now, suppose with current technology I can accurately count the number of photons collected by a photoreceptor to within +/- 1000. Obviously, 1000 is a larger percentage of the 1 nm^2 photoreceptor's 250,000 capacity than it is for the 4 nm^2 receptor's 1,000,000 capacity - hence the 4 nm^2 receptor's accuracy is much greater than the 1 nm^2's.
In any case, don't take my word for this, I'm not a rocket scientist or anything. But these guys are.
If anyone knows, how would these new rules affect existing state laws? Would it superceed them or would the state laws remain in effect? I.E. in California, those involved in software development are required to be non-exempt unless they make over approx. $85k/yr or are management. Would these new federal rules override California's law?
I was just told I'm being laid off from my company. Many of us here have been forced to spend two or three NIGHTS a week on the phone with our 'colleagues' in India who have turned out to be our replacements over the course of more than a year. While its bad enough to be forced to train your replacement, we were forced to do so on what should have been our own personal time!
IMHO, Gateway's retail stores were doomed from the get go. Perhaps the target customer for the stores was someone who, unlike me, wouldn't otherwise go to Gateway's web site, but for me I found the stores to be next to useless. Why?
Well, at least when I went in a few years ago, you could not actually buy a computer from the store, per se. They would order one on your behalf, to be shipped to your house - in other words, exactly what would happen if you simply ordered the computer from their web site, complete with the shipping charge and the accompanying delay in getting your computer. In fact, I think if you elected to order one, the salesman would literally log in to the same Gateway web site that everone has access to and enter your information for you.
All the stores amounted to, then, was a place to see the hardware and use it hands on before you made a purchase - in other words, not really that useful at all.
Apple stores, on the other hand, will probably be successful in the long run, I suspect. Why? Well, first, at least in my area, they seem to actually have selected good locations, where there is a lot of foot traffic, and they always seem to be crowded. Second, you can buy pretty much anything you see in the store, on demand. Third, the Apple brand and their reputation, to go along with the fact that to the average consumer, Apple's products look and feel cool and hip, not like the boxy PCs sold by Dell and Gateway.
Over the years I have come to accept useless meetings as a fact of my job - and even though they should frusterate me I have pretty much become numb to the whole experience. What still gets me every time, however, is the dolts who for whatever reason (personally I think its probably that they like to hear themselves speak) seek to extend the useless meetings as much as possible with useless conversations while the rest of us are anxious to leave and get back to our work.
Scientists have now set up a "tiger team" of top experts to work through all possible reasons for the silence.
Isn't it easily predictable that the probe might not "phone home". Why do they wait until after it happens to figure out why this might be? Why not deal with likely scenarious ahead of time to minimize their risk of happening?
To me, this was exactly the problem with one of NASA's earlier Mars missions, where the prevailing post-failure theory was that the descent rocket shut down prematurely due to a software glitch. I just cannot understand why NASA, in this case, did not more thoroughly investigate possible scenarios where there was no post-landing communication with the proble and discover the software flaw before hand.
I know that its easy to second guess the engineers, and that figuring out why a problem might happen in advance of it happening is not easy, but these are rocket scientists and the time for their questions is before a failure occurs, not after it.
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I think that besides size, weight, etc., one of the considerations is what happens if something goes wrong and Huygens crashes on Titan with an RTG aboard? It would be like setting off a dirty bomb there - contaminating the place with all sorts of radiation that could probably ruin future missions and might piss off the odd Titanian or two that might be living there.
Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an Earth shattering kaboom!
From the looks of it, the scramjet engine doesn't appear to be a very sophisticated device. It's just a funnel...
Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, it really doesn't have any moving parts, but designing it properly is an extremily complex undertaking. I believe engineers have compared it to trying to keep a match lit in the middle of a hurricane.
While the thermal issues are no doubt complex, that sort of problem has been tackled before (the space shuttle far exceeds Mach 10 during re-entry, for example).
Ok, I'm curious about people's experiences. If you work for a large company, and especially if you're "Joe IT Worker", a non-manager sys admin or programmer type, have you ever done anything that has, up or down, influenced the price of your company's stock in any meaningful way?
I've been at my (quite large) company a long time, at times I've been a stellar performer (and my performance reviews have indicated as such), and at other times I've been so-so. Through it all, I highly doubt that I've ever, ever, done anything (or ever had the opportunity to do something) to influence the stock price of the company even one penny up or down.
At the same time, I've seen plenty of examples where the company stock price benifited, or was the victim of, market whims, regional economics, good or bad luck, questionable decisions by upper management, etc.
So, I can see large company's giving stock options to lower level IT types as a way to retain employees, but do these company's really think that options are going to influence this type of employee into being a better performer? Are employees at these types of companies really gullible enough to think that they can make a difference?
Absolutely.
Say that 1 million people pirate windows. Now suppose based on Windows increased popularity, 100,000 people buy windows and another 200,000 pirate it. That's 100,000 copies of windows sold (money in MS's pocket), AND 1.3 million machines that AREN't using Linux. Plus these new 300,000 users further increase windows popularity, leading to more pirating / buying of windows and non-use of Linux. MS supresses the competition and still makes money. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Indeed. Even if Bush loses I've been demoralized by the amount of support he still enjoys. It may be below 50% but in my mind that's far too high.
Maybe I'm nuts, but I think much of Bush's support comes from people for whom Iraq is not the number one issue - rather religious / social views are the number one issues to these folks, who, right or wrong, are aligned much more closely with Bush's conservative views than they are with Kerry's views. I'm sure that there's some polls out there to confirm or deny this, but I'm simply too lazy to go and hunt them down right now.
Hmmm, and if you indicated to your friend that you'd like him to say that he likes how the car looks, or you pressure him to say that, and go tell your wife what your friend said, that doesn't make you a liar, but it hardly seems like something on the up-and-up.
Considering that at least some of the intel analysts (according to the NYT article) indicated that they felt pressure to give a certain view, I'd say that the above analogy applies.
Oh, and lies of omission are still lies. Not telling someone that you coerced the advice you are basing your recommendations on is a clear lie of omission.
So, a president lying under oath about sex is worse, in your mind, than, say, a president lying to our soldiers, their parents, and the American people about why he's risking their lives, why he's risking the credibility and prestige of the United States, not to mention why he's risking all of the other potentially negative consequences of going to war?
Now, granted, Bush, Cheney, and Co. were not technically under oath to tell the truth when they made all of their assorted 'statements of fact' to all of us, but I submit that for men in their positions, telling the truth about such matters ought to be for them a matter of honor, a matter of doing what's right and far more important than whether or not they're under oath at the time.
If the president lying about such things is not an 'impeachable offense', it certainly ought to be, and I can't help but wonder what would be going on right now if Congress were controlled by the other party.
I don't care if he calls it Gigli Part 2, just so long as the movie is actually good this time.
First, gotta love section 1, that asks that the bill be referred to as the "Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation Act of 2004". The bill has absolutely nothing to do with the exploitation of children, but who would vote against a bill whose title suggests that if you do vote for it you will be helping to prevent the exploitation of children.
/. start a campaign to remove Senator Hatch from office entitled "Corporate Lobbying Devolves into Blatant Deception and Exploitation of the American Consumer, Voter and Tax Payer Recall Campaign". We can start by gathering a large group of child exploitation victims to meet with Senator Hatch in his office to ask him why he is trivializing their experiences.
In response, I suggest that we on
If this bill passes, then the following seems likely to occur:
Xerox, RIP.
Kinkos, RIP.
Makers of video and audio recording devices, like CD / DVD burners, TIVO, etc, RIP.
Hey, maybe even the manufacturing of DVD / CD pressing equipment and film duplication equipment will be illegal under this bill. And how do the RIAA and MPAA geniuses propose to continue in business once that occurs?
If nothing else, I'll love to see the entertainment parts of Sony try and sue the electronics manufacturing parts of Sony out of existence.
Just out of curiousity, wasn't turning Casini's antenna dish towards the direction of travel as a shield against hitting anything pretty futile? At 60,000+ KPH, isn't the energy involved in hitting anything much bigger than a spec of dust (and even that) going to pretty much be disasterous? We saw that foam at 500 mph can pucnch holes in reinforced carbon-carbon. A pebble (much less mass, but much, much more speed) at 60,000 kph seems like it would ruin Cassini.
I honestly used to get scared to death from the sound playing Wolfenstein 3D - coming through a door to find one of those sub-machine gun toting SS guys and his yell when he saw you used to always cause me to jump in my chair.
But that was nothing as compared with the original Doom - preparing to go through a door took a lot of prayer and the sounds of the monsters when they saw you could almost frighten me into another dimension.
Wow, I can't believe that it was only 8 years ago. When the original Quake was released, I honestly wasn't that impressed by it. Perhaps that's because I never had such hot hardware to run it on. But, mostly I remember thinking that the main way in which Quake, as a gaming engine, improved on Doom / Doom 2 (which I really loved) was by providing a true 3D environment, as opposed to Doom's psuedo-3D. Yet, to me, Doom was so well done in terms of level design, etc, that all Quake did was make me aware of things that Doom did not do, but that I had never missed in Doom as I never really realised that Doom wasn't doing them.
Lets see... my CPU, my hard drive space, my electricity - what do my means have to do with their freedom of speech?
I mean, newspapers have the right to deny paid advertising if they feel it is innappropriate etc., even though this might infringe on the potential advertiser's freedom of speech. Clearly, the newspapers cannot be forced to use their facilities or equipment to facilitate someone else's freedom of speech - why should I be forced to use my computer to do so, and more so, why should I be forced to do so without compensation?
In conclusion, to adequately excercise my own freedom of speech, I'd just like to say that me thinks that this judge has a bad case of, to use the legal term, headus upus assus.
Exactly! I think 2 or 3 MP is probably enough if you framed the shot perfectly. But if you didn't and you want to crop it, and you still want a decent amount of pixels in the resulting crop (especially if you want to print the resulting crop), starting with 2 or 3 megapixels in the original image is probably not going to be enough for a lot of situations.
Say you took the exact same photo with two cameras. I'll use the Nikon D70 dSLR as one example - it produces 6.1 MP images (3008x2000). I'll use a hypothetical 3MP camera as another example (for purposes of this example, I want both cameras to have the same ~ 3:2 aspect ratio so that I'm comparing apples to apples. Even though most digicams do not have that aspect ratio, the point remains the same) that takes images at 2132*1424. Crop 10% off each edge of the image. On the Nikon you're left with an image roughly 2400x1400, ~ 3.3 megapixels. Do the same thing on the 3MP camera and you're left with 1706x1104, roughly 1.9 megapixels. Start with a 2 megapixel camera and you'll be left with even less.
So, the point is, if you're going to be doing any serious cropping of your images, a 2 or 3MP digicam is probably not going to leave you with enough pixels to be able to make decent prints if we figure that the final image we're printing needs 2 or 3MP to look good.
Heck, POV-Ray was what inspired me (way back) to upgrade from that 386DX-33 to the 486DX2-66 with a 2 meg Diamond Viper VESA card so I could display 800x600 in 24 bit(!) :) I also love the fact that, as opposed to most other (triangle / polygon based) renderers, POV-Ray's primitives are perfect shapes (i.e. a sphere in POV-Ray is a perfect sphere, not some sort of polygon based construct with Gourad shading) unless of course you intentionally build up objects from its triangle primitive.
Well, that there sums up the problems with the first two films in the new trilogy - a) absolutely horrible story lines and b) while the special effects have been great, they definetly do not give you the "wow" factor that the original trilogy's effects did. The effects were great, and in some way ground breaking due to their quantity, but I don't think in the first two films there have been any shots at all that had people's jaws on the floor as was the case with the first trilogy.
"...And I bet I'll still see you guys in line for episode 3 tickets."
If the producers of Gigli had paid off Lucas so that they could retitle their film Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Bennifer that film would have grossed $300 million at the domestic box office. Its Star Wars - no matter how badly Lucas screws it up, simply because of the fact that its a Star Wars movie it will gross several hundred million and be a huge success anyway.
My take is this - walk into a bank, a museum, or a host of other public places and you are being tracked anyway, by security cameras and the like. No one is asking you to consent. If you post some signs to make it clear to the hikers that these monitoring devices are in place and by hiking these trails they consent to such monitoring, you ought to be ok, I would think.
In a lot of communities, run the wrong red light and get a free 8x10 of you and your car for your troubles.
I think on the D70 you can observe charge bleeding if you try to shoot directly (or nearly directly) into the sun. Here is an example. I imagine this would probably occur on most CCD based cameras.
Unfortunately I don't know of any "regular" CCD cameras that give you more than 8 bits per color channel.
Actually, as far as Nikon goes, all of their CCD based dSLR's capture 12 bpp per color channel, the D70 included. But, you will only get this data out of the camera when you shoot in RAW format. Shoot JPEG and the data is lost as you're limitted to 8bpp with JPEG. I *think* Canon's dSLR's, including the Digital Rebel, can also do this - of course they are not CCD based but CMOS based.
I thought that CCD chips were something like 50 times more sensitive to light than film.
Not sure about this. I know on a D70, the minimum ISO is 200. This means that taking into account the filters placed over the CCD, the sensitivity of the sensor is roughly equivelant to ISO 200 film. At higher ISO's you aren't making the sensor more sensitive, you are actually just amplifying its base ISO 200 signal which is why more noise is apparent in the resulting picture. In any case, I know that some CCD based cameras start at ISO 50, so to a large degree it probably largely depends on the strength of the filters being used, but this is a topic that I really don't know that much about.
A lens designed for a 35mm film camera will project a focused image onto the film plane. The image will be circular. The rectangle of the 35mm film frame that you are exposing will barely fit within the circle (i.e. the corners of the film frame will just be touching the edge of the circle).
On a dSLR, like the Nikon D70 (referenced in the article), the sensor is smaller than the film frame of the 35 mm camera, and as a result the sensor fits more easily into the boundaries of the image circle formed by the lens.
Because of this, the effective field of view changes. The area of the D70's sensor is roughly 2/3 that of a 35mm film frame. As a result, the D70's "crop factor", or its "focal length multiplier", is around 1.5x. Attach a 50mm lens to the D70 and the field of view captured by its sensor will be roughly equal to that which a 35mm camera would capture using a 75mm lens, because the D70 is only capturing a smaller area of the image.
Clearly, there is less light hitting the D70's sensor with the same lens / same aperature as compared to a 35mm film frame. However, the density of the light falling on the D70's sensor with the same lens at the same aperature is exactly the same as the light falling on the film in a 35mm camera. The difference is that the D70's sensor is gathering less of the lens's total image. Take a shot at f2.8 on the D70 set to ISO 200, and you should get the same exposure as the same shot at f2.8 on the 35mm camera with ISO 200 film, since the density of the light striking the sensor / film is the same in both cases.
What is most interesting is that lenses tend to produce more distortion toward the boundary of the image circle (i.e., at the corners of a 35mm photo). On the D70, using a normal 35mm lense, the image is captured from the center of the image circle, resulting in less distortion from the lens.
At the same time, Nikon has produced lenses specifically designed for the D70's sensor size. These lenses are smaller than the equivelant lens for a 35mm camera. The reason? These lenses only need to produce a smaller image circle than a 35mm lens, one that barely encompasses the sensor size of the D70 (and would not fully encompass the 35mm film frame). They are only capturing the light necessary to create an image circle of that size. Therefore, the outer edges of the lens elements that would be needed if the lens were made for a 35mm camera can be discarded, resulting in a smaller, lighter lens.
Larger photo sites do require more light than a smaller photo site to achieve the same exposure. But again, it is the density of the light that evens the playing field. A photoreceptor site of 4 nm^2 will gather 4 times the light of a 1 nm^2 photoreceptor site. Suppose a maximum of 250,000 photons are collected by the 1 nm^2 photoreceptor, and the 4 nm^2 site collects a maximum 1,000,000. Now, suppose with current technology I can accurately count the number of photons collected by a photoreceptor to within +/- 1000. Obviously, 1000 is a larger percentage of the 1 nm^2 photoreceptor's 250,000 capacity than it is for the 4 nm^2 receptor's 1,000,000 capacity - hence the 4 nm^2 receptor's accuracy is much greater than the 1 nm^2's.
In any case, don't take my word for this, I'm not a rocket scientist or anything. But these guys are.
If anyone knows, how would these new rules affect existing state laws? Would it superceed them or would the state laws remain in effect? I.E. in California, those involved in software development are required to be non-exempt unless they make over approx. $85k/yr or are management. Would these new federal rules override California's law?
I was just told I'm being laid off from my company. Many of us here have been forced to spend two or three NIGHTS a week on the phone with our 'colleagues' in India who have turned out to be our replacements over the course of more than a year. While its bad enough to be forced to train your replacement, we were forced to do so on what should have been our own personal time!
IMHO, Gateway's retail stores were doomed from the get go. Perhaps the target customer for the stores was someone who, unlike me, wouldn't otherwise go to Gateway's web site, but for me I found the stores to be next to useless. Why?
Well, at least when I went in a few years ago, you could not actually buy a computer from the store, per se. They would order one on your behalf, to be shipped to your house - in other words, exactly what would happen if you simply ordered the computer from their web site, complete with the shipping charge and the accompanying delay in getting your computer. In fact, I think if you elected to order one, the salesman would literally log in to the same Gateway web site that everone has access to and enter your information for you.
All the stores amounted to, then, was a place to see the hardware and use it hands on before you made a purchase - in other words, not really that useful at all.
Apple stores, on the other hand, will probably be successful in the long run, I suspect. Why? Well, first, at least in my area, they seem to actually have selected good locations, where there is a lot of foot traffic, and they always seem to be crowded. Second, you can buy pretty much anything you see in the store, on demand. Third, the Apple brand and their reputation, to go along with the fact that to the average consumer, Apple's products look and feel cool and hip, not like the boxy PCs sold by Dell and Gateway.
Over the years I have come to accept useless meetings as a fact of my job - and even though they should frusterate me I have pretty much become numb to the whole experience. What still gets me every time, however, is the dolts who for whatever reason (personally I think its probably that they like to hear themselves speak) seek to extend the useless meetings as much as possible with useless conversations while the rest of us are anxious to leave and get back to our work.
All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landings there.
'nuff said.
Scientists have now set up a "tiger team" of top experts to work through all possible reasons for the silence.
Isn't it easily predictable that the probe might not "phone home". Why do they wait until after it happens to figure out why this might be? Why not deal with likely scenarious ahead of time to minimize their risk of happening?
To me, this was exactly the problem with one of NASA's earlier Mars missions, where the prevailing post-failure theory was that the descent rocket shut down prematurely due to a software glitch. I just cannot understand why NASA, in this case, did not more thoroughly investigate possible scenarios where there was no post-landing communication with the proble and discover the software flaw before hand.
I know that its easy to second guess the engineers, and that figuring out why a problem might happen in advance of it happening is not easy, but these are rocket scientists and the time for their questions is before a failure occurs, not after it.