You need to read your cosmology books more carefully. There is no indication of an 'end' to the current universe just eventual evolution to an essentially empty void (which could be very similar to the void that preceded it). Given enough time (a hella-hubble-time or more) there will independent quantum fluctuations within that void resulting in big-bang like events.
The rest of your argument is just garbage. Not to mention that it's wrong in the extreme. People have been making such "proofs" for thousands of years and most rely on the same flawed assumptions like "everything has a cause." We'll its the modern world and we know more about physics. The main thing of interest here is "events do not need causes". And the event that formed the universe fits neatly into that category of event, especially when recent data is considered.
If you want to start with some arguments that weren't discredited 400 years ago, we can start over.
Religion is more of a mental illness than a physical sickness. And part of the illness is feeling the need to tell everyone about it. We hope that someday a means of treating it will be found.
The ISO setting is just a multiplier. It doesn't actually change anything in the sensor. If you want lower ISO than the camera can provide you can set to the minimum ISO and overexpose. If your camera has an ISO 200 setting and you want 25, then overexpose 3 stops. Then adjust the exposure back down in software if you haven't saturated. (You may actually have to write your own code to do this "right"). Or you can emulate a lower ISO by taking multiple exposures (in this case 8) at the normal exposure and using a median or average of the images.
The problem with CCDs is that they are too accurate in rendering colors and might not match the purposely distorted colors that come out of color film. If you're not getting the colors that you like it's because the built in color profiles in your camera aren't to your liking, not because the ISO is wrong. If you've ever manually developed color film you know that the resulting colors are strongly dependent on processing and printing. It's hard for an amateur to get professional lab quality results without a lot of practice. The same is true of digital photography. You're going to need to tweak your colors to get them right.
That's been true of film cameras for quite some time. But if you buy Nikon, nothing stops you from putting old non-AE non-AF lenses on it. The damn shame is that they've gotten rid of the old microprism and split-ring focusing aids, so you'll have to rely on the ground glass or turn on the electronic range finder. But changing exposure modes is pretty much the same as it was on my old Canon AE-1. Turn a knob to M if you want full manual exposure, A if you want to control the aperture, S if you want to control the shutter, P for "Programmed" mode.
While parent post is true, it is also true that only commercial photographers could afford to take advantage of the wide color gamut and other great qualities of wet photography.
Not so. I had a Canon 35mm SLR in 1968, and the slides I took had far more realistic colors than digital photos do.
It depends upon what you mean by realistic. Slide film is probably better at representing the colors your brain remembers. The digital photos are probably better at representing the colors as they were. The brilliant colors of that sunset don't really look like that. The high contrast of the situation is making your brain do a contrast stretch and exaggerate the colors. The way films support large dynamic range is by giving up linearity. In contrast, CCD's are linear sensors that rely on translation tables to mimic film. Turn off those tables and you get an exact representations except where you've saturated the sensor. (Your camera may even support this.) What you'll get is a true representation of the light hitting the sensors. And it will probably look washed out, especially in print.
Anyway, if you're disappointed with the colors, go into you camera settings and boost the saturation a notch. Play with it until you find a setting you like.
The point of the site's author in the d200 vs 4x5 article is that you can get extremely good quality digital images by using a large format view camera and a film scanner for near (or better) the same price as a decent DSLR.
Or at least it was five years ago you ignore the cost of film and processing. You can now get a decent DSLR for significantly less than the price of a $3000 film scanner.
The "general consensus" among photographers was that Kodachrome displayed better colours than Ektachrome and Ektachrome's stepbrothers (Fujichrome etc.).
It's not necessarily that the colors were "better" its more that saturation was higher is Kodachrome slides resulting in more vivid colors (especially reds, IMHO). I have no doubt that Ektachrome was more accurate in its color portrayal (although I thought its greens were too muted in a way that gave a bluish cast when underexposed even slightly). But accuracy wasn't necessarily what you were going for when shooting Kodachrome. When I was shooting film (long ago) Kodachrome 25 was the smallest grained film that was generally available while the nearest common Ektachrome was ASA 64 and had larger grain.
Forgotten digital data may be as good as gone, but forgotten photo albums can still be opened up and looked at.
If you haven't looked at them recently, you may be surprised to find how much the pictures in your photo albums have faded. If you want a good scan you may have to risk damaging the photo. To get decent reproduction of a significant photo I often need to spend 15 minutes post scan adjusting color and contrast and removing artifacts. For professional quality work, I need more time. Especially for Kodachrome slides. After a scan they tend to look like Ektachrome and need a saturation boost.
I've learned over the years that portable media should never be used for permanent storage. It's just not reliable enough. Use fixed disks for backup and a backup of the backup. When your archive is getting full, double its size. Never delete anything because you're sure you have a backup. I currently have 2TB in backup and another 2TB as a backup of the backup. At some point I'll buy four 2TB drives, copy everything over to them and stash the old backup copy somewhere safe. I've been doing that since large drives were 100MB. Those drives are probably still readable, but since everything on them is on the current archive, I don't need to find out. Expensive? Maybe, but not as expensive as it used to be. Better than loosing stuff.
Opinion is fine as long as it is defined as opinion and not FACT. They should have a disclaimer bar that scrolls across the top of the screen at all times stating this network (Fox News) is not reporting news, just their opinions on what they consider the news.
Wow... that would pretty much destroy every cable news outlet in business today, at least as a "News" outlet.
Good! And why not? They certainly deserve to die...
I'll tell you a story. Back in the old Republic, before the dark times, before the Emperor (Reagan), in order to get a license to use the public airwaves, television stations actually had to do things that were in the public interest... Among the things they did were broadcasting public service announcement, broadcasting programming suitable for children at certain hours, and broadcasting informative news programs. The news was required to be fair and balanced. It was not allowed to pander to one political party or another. When a license was up for renewal the FCC would ask for input from the public and look to see if the station had acted in the public interest. If it had not the license might not be renewed.
In order to ensure licence renewals the three networks spent lots of money on news programming. They had quality anchors and quality reported and the ratings weren't bad. Because there were only three networks there was nothing else you could watch. But as more and more stations came on the air and cable TV started to catch on, there started to be options besides the news. And with CNN and Headline News, now you could watch the news anytime. So the network ratings started slipping. To get their ratings back the networks started to add more fluff to their news broadcasts.
And the FCC did notice and mentioned it. "But TBS can show the Braves game and Cheers all day long without any news! That's not fair!" the networks did cry. Their cries reached the ears of the Emperor who screamed "Requiring that corporations act in the public interest is communism! No more shall we require anything of the broadcasters except that they not kill a whole bunch of people." Later the requirement that broadcasters not kill people was rescinded.
And the networks did try to rescue their news programs by removing news and adding fluff. The the news sunk anyway. CNN and Headline news did prosper for a while, until copycats Fox News and MS-NBC came along. With more competition, a new way to survive was reinvented: Remove all your news and add pointless fluff. The best pointless fluff was right wing propaganda that would make people angry. Americans used four news outlets. but none of them had news. Those few that actually wanted news went to the British or to the last bastion of American communism, NPR.
And thus the fourth estate died alone, and the Republic shortly thereafter.
Actually, I believe the courts have weighed in on the issue and has said that news organizations can lie with near impunity. The case I'm thinking of involved two investigative reporters at a FOX affiliate who were asked to lie about a sponsor during one of their investigative reports (on pollution, I believe). They refused and were fired. The fraudulent story was aired and the reporters sued. The courts said that the FOX affiliate was justified in terminating the reporters, and that refusing to lie in a news report was not a protected activity. That pretty much implies that lying in a news report is a protected activity.
Funniest thing is that people have said that to me, and they weren't joking. Part of the reason I got an HTC Incredible is that everyone kept talking about how open Android phones are. Then I was like, "Ok, now how do I get WiFi tethering on this bad-boy?"
You need to stop talking to stupid people and start talking to people who know what they are doing. EasyTether ($9.99) and EasyTether Lite (free but doesn't do all protocols) will do it for you without needing to root the phone.
There's one reason I can think of to buy one. Do you make trips to places where your cell company's coverage is bad or non-existant? Google maps/nav, at least on my Droid, requires data access to pull down maps. It can be difficult to get directions if the phone doesn't have maps for the entire route cached.
A few weeks ago I was in a 4WD on unmapped logging roads trying to find a way into a lake. Intermittent edge network coverage was enough to get what I needed most of the time. But if I didn't have that intermittent coverage, I would have been out of luck.
I wish Google would add a "cache the maps and satellite images for everything within 100 miles of here" function.
The Nexus One has the advantage of being able to use the cell network for coarse positioning and a relatively precise time, which greatly speed the GPS signal lock. The Tomtom probably assumes it is in exactly the same place it was when it was turned off, but the clock will have drifted significantly compared to the accuracy needed for a GPS signal lock.
It doesn't matter whether it's desirable for Apple. Apple doesn't have legal grounds to stop them from using the iPood name. So Apple is stopping them using financial means.
Owing to the size of the universe, I think it is likely that this new record will be broken sometime soon.
The record is for the largest one found, not the largest one in the universe. These things are pretty difficult to find. They're all in dense clusters in active star forming regions. The cluster R136 is so dense that prior to the launch of HST we thought that there were fewer stars in it, but each of those stars would have been several hundred solar masses. HST was able to resolve those superstars into multiple smaller (50 solar mass) stars. Except for this one, apparently.
We haven't found any equivalent star clusters in the Milkyway (yet). It's possible there aren't any. Maybe something about the composition or dynamics of Galactic gas prevents such large stars from forming. No other galaxy would be close enough that we could resolve cluster into individual stars. The SMC doesn't have active star formation. So we're stuck with the LMC as a target for finding a larger star. There's no other cluster in the LMC like R136, so to break this record we'd probably need to find a larger star in the same cluster. Or we would need to find out that R136a1 is a multiple star system containing 2 or more smaller stars rather than one star of 265 solar masses.
As far as how significant this is... I'm sure it will drive star formation theorists nuts trying to build stars that big in a cluster environment. But as a find, in and of itself, they looked for a really huge star in what is well known as the only place you're going to possibly find a really huge star. It seems kind of like "discovering" a route from your front door to the bus stop when you know where both of them are. Given how many people are interested in star forming regions, I'm kind of wondering why nobody did it earlier. I may have to read the paper to see if some interesting or difficult technique was necessary.
In most cases people only get "frauded" if they let themselves. For example I recently was charged $35 late fee for a credit bill I never got. The phone operator refused to do anything, so I got ahold of the supervisor and told him point blank, "Remove the fee or close the card. Your choice." He decided he's rather not lose my ~15,000 a year business and refunded the money.
You pay $15,000 a year in credit card interest? Or you get charge $15,000 a year and pay no interest? If the latter, you're more likely worth about $300 a year to them. Credit card companies are usually glad to get rid of customers like that.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to read your cosmology books more carefully. There is no indication of an 'end' to the current universe just eventual evolution to an essentially empty void (which could be very similar to the void that preceded it). Given enough time (a hella-hubble-time or more) there will independent quantum fluctuations within that void resulting in big-bang like events.
The rest of your argument is just garbage. Not to mention that it's wrong in the extreme. People have been making such "proofs" for thousands of years and most rely on the same flawed assumptions like "everything has a cause." We'll its the modern world and we know more about physics. The main thing of interest here is "events do not need causes". And the event that formed the universe fits neatly into that category of event, especially when recent data is considered.
If you want to start with some arguments that weren't discredited 400 years ago, we can start over.
Religion is more of a mental illness than a physical sickness. And part of the illness is feeling the need to tell everyone about it. We hope that someday a means of treating it will be found.
The ISO setting is just a multiplier. It doesn't actually change anything in the sensor. If you want lower ISO than the camera can provide you can set to the minimum ISO and overexpose. If your camera has an ISO 200 setting and you want 25, then overexpose 3 stops. Then adjust the exposure back down in software if you haven't saturated. (You may actually have to write your own code to do this "right"). Or you can emulate a lower ISO by taking multiple exposures (in this case 8) at the normal exposure and using a median or average of the images.
The problem with CCDs is that they are too accurate in rendering colors and might not match the purposely distorted colors that come out of color film. If you're not getting the colors that you like it's because the built in color profiles in your camera aren't to your liking, not because the ISO is wrong. If you've ever manually developed color film you know that the resulting colors are strongly dependent on processing and printing. It's hard for an amateur to get professional lab quality results without a lot of practice. The same is true of digital photography. You're going to need to tweak your colors to get them right.
That's been true of film cameras for quite some time. But if you buy Nikon, nothing stops you from putting old non-AE non-AF lenses on it. The damn shame is that they've gotten rid of the old microprism and split-ring focusing aids, so you'll have to rely on the ground glass or turn on the electronic range finder. But changing exposure modes is pretty much the same as it was on my old Canon AE-1. Turn a knob to M if you want full manual exposure, A if you want to control the aperture, S if you want to control the shutter, P for "Programmed" mode.
While parent post is true, it is also true that only commercial photographers could afford to take advantage of the wide color gamut and other great qualities of wet photography.
Not so. I had a Canon 35mm SLR in 1968, and the slides I took had far more realistic colors than digital photos do.
It depends upon what you mean by realistic. Slide film is probably better at representing the colors your brain remembers. The digital photos are probably better at representing the colors as they were. The brilliant colors of that sunset don't really look like that. The high contrast of the situation is making your brain do a contrast stretch and exaggerate the colors. The way films support large dynamic range is by giving up linearity. In contrast, CCD's are linear sensors that rely on translation tables to mimic film. Turn off those tables and you get an exact representations except where you've saturated the sensor. (Your camera may even support this.) What you'll get is a true representation of the light hitting the sensors. And it will probably look washed out, especially in print.
Anyway, if you're disappointed with the colors, go into you camera settings and boost the saturation a notch. Play with it until you find a setting you like.
The point of the site's author in the d200 vs 4x5 article is that you can get extremely good quality digital images by using a large format view camera and a film scanner for near (or better) the same price as a decent DSLR.
Or at least it was five years ago you ignore the cost of film and processing. You can now get a decent DSLR for significantly less than the price of a $3000 film scanner.
The "general consensus" among photographers was that Kodachrome displayed better colours than Ektachrome and Ektachrome's stepbrothers (Fujichrome etc.).
It's not necessarily that the colors were "better" its more that saturation was higher is Kodachrome slides resulting in more vivid colors (especially reds, IMHO). I have no doubt that Ektachrome was more accurate in its color portrayal (although I thought its greens were too muted in a way that gave a bluish cast when underexposed even slightly). But accuracy wasn't necessarily what you were going for when shooting Kodachrome. When I was shooting film (long ago) Kodachrome 25 was the smallest grained film that was generally available while the nearest common Ektachrome was ASA 64 and had larger grain.
As a rocket scientist, I find the complexities of C++ to be a refreshing change from rocket science.
Forgotten digital data may be as good as gone, but forgotten photo albums can still be opened up and looked at.
If you haven't looked at them recently, you may be surprised to find how much the pictures in your photo albums have faded. If you want a good scan you may have to risk damaging the photo. To get decent reproduction of a significant photo I often need to spend 15 minutes post scan adjusting color and contrast and removing artifacts. For professional quality work, I need more time. Especially for Kodachrome slides. After a scan they tend to look like Ektachrome and need a saturation boost.
I've learned over the years that portable media should never be used for permanent storage. It's just not reliable enough. Use fixed disks for backup and a backup of the backup. When your archive is getting full, double its size. Never delete anything because you're sure you have a backup. I currently have 2TB in backup and another 2TB as a backup of the backup. At some point I'll buy four 2TB drives, copy everything over to them and stash the old backup copy somewhere safe. I've been doing that since large drives were 100MB. Those drives are probably still readable, but since everything on them is on the current archive, I don't need to find out. Expensive? Maybe, but not as expensive as it used to be. Better than loosing stuff.
Does EasyTether support WiFi?
I assume so, but I've never needed to try. I'll try tonight.
It maximizes the user's freedom at the expense of the developers
Yes, and since it was the developers that chose the license, no problem.
Opinion is fine as long as it is defined as opinion and not FACT. They should have a disclaimer bar that scrolls across the top of the screen at all times stating this network (Fox News) is not reporting news, just their opinions on what they consider the news.
Wow... that would pretty much destroy every cable news outlet in business today, at least as a "News" outlet.
Good! And why not? They certainly deserve to die...
I'll tell you a story. Back in the old Republic, before the dark times, before the Emperor (Reagan), in order to get a license to use the public airwaves, television stations actually had to do things that were in the public interest... Among the things they did were broadcasting public service announcement, broadcasting programming suitable for children at certain hours, and broadcasting informative news programs. The news was required to be fair and balanced. It was not allowed to pander to one political party or another. When a license was up for renewal the FCC would ask for input from the public and look to see if the station had acted in the public interest. If it had not the license might not be renewed.
In order to ensure licence renewals the three networks spent lots of money on news programming. They had quality anchors and quality reported and the ratings weren't bad. Because there were only three networks there was nothing else you could watch. But as more and more stations came on the air and cable TV started to catch on, there started to be options besides the news. And with CNN and Headline News, now you could watch the news anytime. So the network ratings started slipping. To get their ratings back the networks started to add more fluff to their news broadcasts.
And the FCC did notice and mentioned it. "But TBS can show the Braves game and Cheers all day long without any news! That's not fair!" the networks did cry. Their cries reached the ears of the Emperor who screamed "Requiring that corporations act in the public interest is communism! No more shall we require anything of the broadcasters except that they not kill a whole bunch of people." Later the requirement that broadcasters not kill people was rescinded.
And the networks did try to rescue their news programs by removing news and adding fluff. The the news sunk anyway. CNN and Headline news did prosper for a while, until copycats Fox News and MS-NBC came along. With more competition, a new way to survive was reinvented: Remove all your news and add pointless fluff. The best pointless fluff was right wing propaganda that would make people angry. Americans used four news outlets. but none of them had news. Those few that actually wanted news went to the British or to the last bastion of American communism, NPR.
And thus the fourth estate died alone, and the Republic shortly thereafter.
Actually, I believe the courts have weighed in on the issue and has said that news organizations can lie with near impunity. The case I'm thinking of involved two investigative reporters at a FOX affiliate who were asked to lie about a sponsor during one of their investigative reports (on pollution, I believe). They refused and were fired. The fraudulent story was aired and the reporters sued. The courts said that the FOX affiliate was justified in terminating the reporters, and that refusing to lie in a news report was not a protected activity. That pretty much implies that lying in a news report is a protected activity.
Funniest thing is that people have said that to me, and they weren't joking. Part of the reason I got an HTC Incredible is that everyone kept talking about how open Android phones are. Then I was like, "Ok, now how do I get WiFi tethering on this bad-boy?"
You need to stop talking to stupid people and start talking to people who know what they are doing. EasyTether ($9.99) and EasyTether Lite (free but doesn't do all protocols) will do it for you without needing to root the phone.
There's one reason I can think of to buy one. Do you make trips to places where your cell company's coverage is bad or non-existant? Google maps/nav, at least on my Droid, requires data access to pull down maps. It can be difficult to get directions if the phone doesn't have maps for the entire route cached.
A few weeks ago I was in a 4WD on unmapped logging roads trying to find a way into a lake. Intermittent edge network coverage was enough to get what I needed most of the time. But if I didn't have that intermittent coverage, I would have been out of luck.
I wish Google would add a "cache the maps and satellite images for everything within 100 miles of here" function.
The Nexus One has the advantage of being able to use the cell network for coarse positioning and a relatively precise time, which greatly speed the GPS signal lock. The Tomtom probably assumes it is in exactly the same place it was when it was turned off, but the clock will have drifted significantly compared to the accuracy needed for a GPS signal lock.
It doesn't matter whether it's desirable for Apple. Apple doesn't have legal grounds to stop them from using the iPood name. So Apple is stopping them using financial means.
My name is Potty, you insensitive bastard!
But can someone explain to me how Apple can remotely get away with bullying a company out of a different name for a completely different product?
Apple has lots of money.
All the iPhones on the planet don't stop working when Apple releases a new one.
You'd never know from the users. I'm tiling my bathroom with 3g's.
If I wrap my Droid in aluminum foil I can't get any signal at all! See, all phones have this flaw. Just like Steve said!
Owing to the size of the universe, I think it is likely that this new record will be broken sometime soon.
The record is for the largest one found, not the largest one in the universe. These things are pretty difficult to find. They're all in dense clusters in active star forming regions. The cluster R136 is so dense that prior to the launch of HST we thought that there were fewer stars in it, but each of those stars would have been several hundred solar masses. HST was able to resolve those superstars into multiple smaller (50 solar mass) stars. Except for this one, apparently.
We haven't found any equivalent star clusters in the Milkyway (yet). It's possible there aren't any. Maybe something about the composition or dynamics of Galactic gas prevents such large stars from forming. No other galaxy would be close enough that we could resolve cluster into individual stars. The SMC doesn't have active star formation. So we're stuck with the LMC as a target for finding a larger star. There's no other cluster in the LMC like R136, so to break this record we'd probably need to find a larger star in the same cluster. Or we would need to find out that R136a1 is a multiple star system containing 2 or more smaller stars rather than one star of 265 solar masses.
As far as how significant this is... I'm sure it will drive star formation theorists nuts trying to build stars that big in a cluster environment. But as a find, in and of itself, they looked for a really huge star in what is well known as the only place you're going to possibly find a really huge star. It seems kind of like "discovering" a route from your front door to the bus stop when you know where both of them are. Given how many people are interested in star forming regions, I'm kind of wondering why nobody did it earlier. I may have to read the paper to see if some interesting or difficult technique was necessary.
Human society ended in 1987, when the machines rounded us up and put us in here.
In most cases people only get "frauded" if they let themselves. For example I recently was charged $35 late fee for a credit bill I never got. The phone operator refused to do anything, so I got ahold of the supervisor and told him point blank, "Remove the fee or close the card. Your choice." He decided he's rather not lose my ~15,000 a year business and refunded the money.
You pay $15,000 a year in credit card interest? Or you get charge $15,000 a year and pay no interest? If the latter, you're more likely worth about $300 a year to them. Credit card companies are usually glad to get rid of customers like that.
It would also be "more than three times as many as the 3GS"