How hard is it to add a little printer? it would be much more conspicuous replacing a four-foot stack of receipts with ones from the back of your van.
Not very hard. The machines used in Santa Clara County, California have just such a thing--it's only used to print out vote totals before and after the polls, not individual votes, so it doesn't constitute the separate paper trail some folks feel is critical, but it does give a separate path for the vote results to take, which eliminates some of the risks of post-vote tampering, as well as the risk of losing some of the votes themselves.
whats keeping him from replacing one/all of them with doctored records.
I can't speak for his area, the cartridges used in California (I was a pollwoker in some previous elections) are pretty non-standard. Custom manufacturing of replacement cartridges is probably not the easiest way to cheat the vote in a state that makes it illegal in most circumstances for pollworkers to ask for identification.
Touchpads are the best thing that ever happened to this company. They're getting licensing fees and royalties on almost every notebook sold, or they make money directly as the component vendor for the touch pads.
The latter. They have pointing devices in a bit over half of the touchpads sold (some laptops don't have touchpads, some laptops have non-Synaptics touchpads.) I own stock in Synaptics and regularly listen to their financial conference calls.
The 3x rule is less relevant than it used to be. It's possible to build zooms with higher ranges than that and good optical performance by incorporating one or more aspherical lenses.
While it's certainly true that this mitigates the damage, there's still a signficant quality difference. Just as a single example, omparing the just-released Canon 28-300L with lenses like Canon's older and shorter-range 70-200L/4, there's still a (to me) signficant quality difference that keeps me shooting with more lenses.
Still, I may be pickier than most, I'm shooting an 11MP SLR, and sell large prints. The differences would be far less signficant on a 8x10 (really 7ishx10), of course.
At least for my work, LCD viewfinders just don't cut it, there's never enough information for precise focusing in situations with narrow depth of field.
However truck drivers & others who are forced to spent some time on these stops would really benefit from this.
Ended up talking to a trucker last week, we'd both stopped on a road with a view of Mt. Hood to photograph, and got to talking. Apparently WiFi in truck stops is quite the rage, just for this reason.
I'd agree with that, I don't count myself in the "squealing tires" camp, I'll completely admit that I'm working for those 55 MPG. (But I'm enjoying it, too.)
An aside--one thing that did surprise me is that the right off-the-line acceleration for the Prius for maximum MPG isn't "anemic". It's not anywhere near "tire-squealin'", but best acceleration for MPG off the line is not annoying to most surrounding drivers. Apparently you want to be in the domain where the internal combustion engine is putting out maximum power but that the acceleration isn't being aided by the battery.
It's my understanding that city driving increases MPG in the Prius because the battery is being recharged at each stop as the car brakes.
Kind of. (I own a 2004 Prius.)
Since friction is non-linear with speed, it's rational to expect that fuel economy would be greater at lower speeds. This effect seems to mostly be signficant above 30-40 MPH, other forms of resistance are signficant below that.
Normal cars do fail this because a lot of energy is wasted into breaks. And the Prius does avoid this become some energy (but less than was put into accelerating the car) is recycled at stops.
But on to the main point I wanted to make:
So the battery, after the city test, should have MORE of a charge, rather than less.
Below about 41MPH, the 2004 Prius can run without the internal combustion engine (ICE) running at all for periods of time. So, in city driving, you also get the benefit of not paying for the frictional losses from the ICE
which also increases MPG. Because of this, you
might end up (after running 'all-electric' for a while) with a lower battery charge.
The current hybrids are too small to be useful for anything more than driving to work.
Try sitting in the back seat of a 2004 Prius and saying that. It's not a luxobox, but it's a comfortable mid-sized car, with good headroom for a car of its class. Hardly a commute-only vehicle like the Insight.
I think you're right to worry about batteries, but I don't think they'll necessarily end up as waste. For me, that's an open question.
As for other alternative fuels, E85 (ethanol) is very promising, and once it becomes mass-produced, the costs should go down, until we have a drought in the Midwest
In California, delivery/production of the ethanol probably makes its use energy-inefficient, particularly when you remove various gov't incentives. This probably isn't true for fuel used in the midwest, though.
The batteries is a hybrid have nothing to do with lower emissions, that is all managed by computerized engine controls and catalytic converters.
This isn't quite accurate, IMHO. A hybrid's batteries allow a smaller ICE, which allows for more efficient combustion, and therefore better emissions for a given drive.
Come check my logs. 3K miles, 55MPG lifetime, 57MPG on the last tank, 56.7 MPG so far on the current tank. This is on a mix of freeway and city driving.
I frequent a number of Prius mailing lists and I don't know anyone who has managed as poor a result as 31.5MPG in the new generation Prius. The lowest results I've heard have been in the low 40s. The EPA ratings are bogus, but there's something non-representive about the Consumer Reports results as well.
CO2 isn't the only pollutant put out by internal combustion engines. In the linked comparison of NOx emissions, the vast difference in Prius vs. Insight emissions is not due to differing gas mileage, but other variables, such as different pollution control systems, combustion efficiency, etc.
I'm a new owner of a 2004 Prius, have about 3K miles on the car, my average MPG so far is a bit over 55. My last tank came in at 57MPG. But I'm definitely working for those, I'm enjoying it, but I doubt everyone would. I'd probably be getting 40-45 if I drove it the way I drive my Toyota MR2.
There are a lot of variables which affect hybrid gasoline performance. First, the article is correct to ding the EPA for its tests, the "highway" speeds of those tests are just too low for the worldl I live in.
But there are some very large "how you drive" factors, too.
Speed is a big one. 60 MPH is a lot more efficient than 70 MPH on a flat surface in no wind.
Temperature is another one. I live in California, I'm getting the benefit of good weather. Easterners often see swings of over 10MPG between summer and winter driving, and most of that appears to be weather-related, not gas-forumlation-related. There are several effects hiding in here, including changes to combustion efficiency, tire pressure (and therefore rolling resistance), and air pressure (and therefore friction).
Driving habits are signficant. Driving at fixed speeds, even to the point of extensive use of cruise control, can help mileage signficantly. Gently breaking to stops. Brisk but not jackrabbity acceleration, just the slightest touch of breaking into necessary stops as opposed to driving faster and then breaking harder. One of the primary contributors to my good gas mileage is the real-time information on gas consumption--that information really does begin to affect behavior.
The enthusiasts tend to jack up their tire pressure, but I haven't done that.
(We won't talk about drafting big rigs, it's not safe, but even at two or three seconds in back of a semi at freeway speeds there is a detectable increase in mileage.)
Length of trips is important, too. The ICE runs full-time when the engine is cold, you need to assume that the first five minutes of any trip are going to have signficantly inferior gas mileage. If your trips tend toward the half-hour-long, you're a lot happier than if they tend toward the five-minute hop.
A lot of this stuff would probably help non-hybrids, but I never got a 57MPG tank in my old car.
"And it runs great on regular gas." --Elwood Blues
Agreed--and that includes, IMHO, support for a range of monitor calibration hardware. I only didn't include this on my own list because I didn't know the status of CMS in the GIMP.
Perhaps the only real problem mentioned in the article.
Adjustment layers are non-negotiable for my work. While I do not "photoshop" my nature images in the usual FARK sense of the word, I use adjustment layers with masks to do local and global contrast adjustment and color correction. By doing this, I retain the ability to save the file with adjustment layers and to go back and revisit some of those decisions, out of order, at a later date, and to leave a clear record of my actions.
Now that I'm shooting the Canon 1Ds, Adobe Camera RAW (a Photoshop built-in plugin) is also an essential part of my work.
I produce 4-color notecards in Photoshop, making CYMK support non-negotiable as well.
I could go on, but there's little point. The GIMP is a wonderful thing, but it's not Photoshop, and can't replace Photoshop for many professional and advanced amateur photographers.
I paid, and happily. Adobe Photoshop is one of the few applications I cheerfully pay for, it continually finds new ways to make my work easier and faster.
Of course one of the great things about digital is it can handle variations in colour temperature and mixed lighting much better without messing around with filters and stuff.
Oh my, yes.
Great portfolio! What did you do in tech before you went pro?
Thanks! A weird mix, mostly embedded related stuff. I was an original developer on many of Franklin Electronic Publishers gadgets (the Franklin Spelling Ace, Language Master, bilingual dictionaries, etc.). I worked on touchpad ergonomics and firmware for Synaptics, after doing neural-net research (machine-print OCR) work for them earlier. Oh, and the "Synaptics MoodPad", that was my fault, too.:) And I worked on "TV Navigator for Cable" at Liberate (formerly NCI, formerly Navio Communications), a middleware-based platform for building interactive services for cable systems, while I did some work on a variety of parts of that system, most of it was focused on stuff on the set-top, (graphics porting layer, Javascript interpreter, etc.)
From experience, I'd personally want around 5-6MP for a really high quality 11x17--but you can certainly make some really great images with less than 6MP.
just to be clear. i'm talking about equipment that a non-pro can actually afford. there's certainly equipment out there that can out-perform film already, but it's still out there in the tens of thousands of dollars dept.
Your point is well-taken, even if I'd defend the 1Ds, which is a bit cheaper. For even poor pros, the expensive cameras can be cheap, not because of some "pro" standing, but just because many of us shoot a lot. If you shoot enough, film and processing starts being a lot of money, and digital starts looking more affordable. Only reason I point this out, is that if you shoot a lot, it might be true for you as well.
Still, if you like film, shoot film. It's the print, and your enjoyment of the process, that matters.
I'm a working, professional photographer, I have an EOS 3 and an EOS 1Ds. For years I did my professional work using the film cameras and printing from 100MB (33MP) high-quality drum-scans, usually from Velvia or Provia 100F. You shoot in black and white, that's going to account for some of the differences in our beliefs.
My first test printing comparable images from drum-scanned film and directly from the 1Ds showed far better results at 24"x16" prints from the 1Ds--and then I realized I'd been shooting the 1Ds at ISO 400. My jaw dropped.
It turns out that the size of the scan stops being meaningful because of film grain, and that the amount of film grain turns out to make more of a difference in producing large prints than you'd expect from the "line pairs per inch" measurements. The grain just kills you trying to make enlargements, the cleanliness of the 1Ds image results in larger prints that come closer to very high-qulilty medium-format prints than 35mm.
I did a quick "review of the 1Ds for film photographers", it still needs some work, but you're welcome to read it.
The price tag is large for the 1Ds. For me, that's not an issue, it pays for itself in reduced film and processing costs in a year or so--and I get better results--and I get better flexiblity.
To my eye, sensors have well surpassed color film. Black and white is going to be closer, but... I don't think you should rely (if you are, I don't mean to put words in your mouth) on "megapixels" from film scans as being comparable to "megapixels" from digital sensors directly. Do the experiment, you might be surprised.
FYI, Personal Function 31 is a mode, the signing happens automatically after you take the picture if that mode is on, you can't just ask it to sign after the picture is taken.
Ranging makes things look different too, as does some stuff about how we see edges, and also some special stuff about how wee see shadows, there's lots of weird post-processing. Color is also weird and subjective, take a look at Land's Retinex theory. It's amazing how much what we see really isn't what we see.
Slashdot Mirror
Not very hard. The machines used in Santa Clara County, California have just such a thing--it's only used to print out vote totals before and after the polls, not individual votes, so it doesn't constitute the separate paper trail some folks feel is critical, but it does give a separate path for the vote results to take, which eliminates some of the risks of post-vote tampering, as well as the risk of losing some of the votes themselves.
whats keeping him from replacing one/all of them with doctored records.
I can't speak for his area, the cartridges used in California (I was a pollwoker in some previous elections) are pretty non-standard. Custom manufacturing of replacement cartridges is probably not the easiest way to cheat the vote in a state that makes it illegal in most circumstances for pollworkers to ask for identification.
The latter. They have pointing devices in a bit over half of the touchpads sold (some laptops don't have touchpads, some laptops have non-Synaptics touchpads.) I own stock in Synaptics and regularly listen to their financial conference calls.
While it's certainly true that this mitigates the damage, there's still a signficant quality difference. Just as a single example, omparing the just-released Canon 28-300L with lenses like Canon's older and shorter-range 70-200L/4, there's still a (to me) signficant quality difference that keeps me shooting with more lenses.
Still, I may be pickier than most, I'm shooting an 11MP SLR, and sell large prints. The differences would be far less signficant on a 8x10 (really 7ishx10), of course.
At least for my work, LCD viewfinders just don't cut it, there's never enough information for precise focusing in situations with narrow depth of field.
Ended up talking to a trucker last week, we'd both stopped on a road with a view of Mt. Hood to photograph, and got to talking. Apparently WiFi in truck stops is quite the rage, just for this reason.
An aside--one thing that did surprise me is that the right off-the-line acceleration for the Prius for maximum MPG isn't "anemic". It's not anywhere near "tire-squealin'", but best acceleration for MPG off the line is not annoying to most surrounding drivers. Apparently you want to be in the domain where the internal combustion engine is putting out maximum power but that the acceleration isn't being aided by the battery.
Kind of. (I own a 2004 Prius.)
Since friction is non-linear with speed, it's rational to expect that fuel economy would be greater at lower speeds. This effect seems to mostly be signficant above 30-40 MPH, other forms of resistance are signficant below that.
Normal cars do fail this because a lot of energy is wasted into breaks. And the Prius does avoid this become some energy (but less than was put into accelerating the car) is recycled at stops. But on to the main point I wanted to make:
So the battery, after the city test, should have MORE of a charge, rather than less.
Below about 41MPH, the 2004 Prius can run without the internal combustion engine (ICE) running at all for periods of time. So, in city driving, you also get the benefit of not paying for the frictional losses from the ICE which also increases MPG. Because of this, you might end up (after running 'all-electric' for a while) with a lower battery charge.
Try sitting in the back seat of a 2004 Prius and saying that. It's not a luxobox, but it's a comfortable mid-sized car, with good headroom for a car of its class. Hardly a commute-only vehicle like the Insight.
I think you're right to worry about batteries, but I don't think they'll necessarily end up as waste. For me, that's an open question.
As for other alternative fuels, E85 (ethanol) is very promising, and once it becomes mass-produced, the costs should go down, until we have a drought in the Midwest
In California, delivery/production of the ethanol probably makes its use energy-inefficient, particularly when you remove various gov't incentives. This probably isn't true for fuel used in the midwest, though.
The batteries is a hybrid have nothing to do with lower emissions, that is all managed by computerized engine controls and catalytic converters.
This isn't quite accurate, IMHO. A hybrid's batteries allow a smaller ICE, which allows for more efficient combustion, and therefore better emissions for a given drive.
I frequent a number of Prius mailing lists and I don't know anyone who has managed as poor a result as 31.5MPG in the new generation Prius. The lowest results I've heard have been in the low 40s. The EPA ratings are bogus, but there's something non-representive about the Consumer Reports results as well.
CO2 isn't the only pollutant put out by internal combustion engines. In the linked comparison of NOx emissions, the vast difference in Prius vs. Insight emissions is not due to differing gas mileage, but other variables, such as different pollution control systems, combustion efficiency, etc.
And realized milage varies. I own a Prius, my lifetime MPG on the car is over 55MPG. Just sayin'
There are a lot of variables which affect hybrid gasoline performance. First, the article is correct to ding the EPA for its tests, the "highway" speeds of those tests are just too low for the worldl I live in.
But there are some very large "how you drive" factors, too.
Speed is a big one. 60 MPH is a lot more efficient than 70 MPH on a flat surface in no wind.
Temperature is another one. I live in California, I'm getting the benefit of good weather. Easterners often see swings of over 10MPG between summer and winter driving, and most of that appears to be weather-related, not gas-forumlation-related. There are several effects hiding in here, including changes to combustion efficiency, tire pressure (and therefore rolling resistance), and air pressure (and therefore friction).
Driving habits are signficant. Driving at fixed speeds, even to the point of extensive use of cruise control, can help mileage signficantly. Gently breaking to stops. Brisk but not jackrabbity acceleration, just the slightest touch of breaking into necessary stops as opposed to driving faster and then breaking harder. One of the primary contributors to my good gas mileage is the real-time information on gas consumption--that information really does begin to affect behavior.
The enthusiasts tend to jack up their tire pressure, but I haven't done that.
(We won't talk about drafting big rigs, it's not safe, but even at two or three seconds in back of a semi at freeway speeds there is a detectable increase in mileage.)
Length of trips is important, too. The ICE runs full-time when the engine is cold, you need to assume that the first five minutes of any trip are going to have signficantly inferior gas mileage. If your trips tend toward the half-hour-long, you're a lot happier than if they tend toward the five-minute hop.
A lot of this stuff would probably help non-hybrids, but I never got a 57MPG tank in my old car.
"And it runs great on regular gas." --Elwood Blues
Agreed--and that includes, IMHO, support for a range of monitor calibration hardware. I only didn't include this on my own list because I didn't know the status of CMS in the GIMP.
Perhaps the only real problem mentioned in the article.
Adjustment layers are non-negotiable for my work. While I do not "photoshop" my nature images in the usual FARK sense of the word, I use adjustment layers with masks to do local and global contrast adjustment and color correction. By doing this, I retain the ability to save the file with adjustment layers and to go back and revisit some of those decisions, out of order, at a later date, and to leave a clear record of my actions.
Now that I'm shooting the Canon 1Ds, Adobe Camera RAW (a Photoshop built-in plugin) is also an essential part of my work.
I produce 4-color notecards in Photoshop, making CYMK support non-negotiable as well.
I could go on, but there's little point. The GIMP is a wonderful thing, but it's not Photoshop, and can't replace Photoshop for many professional and advanced amateur photographers.
Disk space, and bandwidth to/from disk, as well. You'd be surprised how slow even 16-bit int work can be on 30 megapixel images, too....
*waves hands*
I paid, and happily. Adobe Photoshop is one of the few applications I cheerfully pay for, it continually finds new ways to make my work easier and faster.
Oh my, yes.
Great portfolio! What did you do in tech before you went pro?
Thanks! A weird mix, mostly embedded related stuff. I was an original developer on many of Franklin Electronic Publishers gadgets (the Franklin Spelling Ace, Language Master, bilingual dictionaries, etc.). I worked on touchpad ergonomics and firmware for Synaptics, after doing neural-net research (machine-print OCR) work for them earlier. Oh, and the "Synaptics MoodPad", that was my fault, too. :) And I worked on "TV Navigator for Cable" at Liberate (formerly NCI, formerly Navio Communications), a middleware-based platform for building interactive services for cable systems, while I did some work on a variety of parts of that system, most of it was focused on stuff on the set-top, (graphics porting layer, Javascript interpreter, etc.)
From experience, I'd personally want around 5-6MP for a really high quality 11x17--but you can certainly make some really great images with less than 6MP.
Your point is well-taken, even if I'd defend the 1Ds, which is a bit cheaper. For even poor pros, the expensive cameras can be cheap, not because of some "pro" standing, but just because many of us shoot a lot. If you shoot enough, film and processing starts being a lot of money, and digital starts looking more affordable. Only reason I point this out, is that if you shoot a lot, it might be true for you as well.
Still, if you like film, shoot film. It's the print, and your enjoyment of the process, that matters.
My first test printing comparable images from drum-scanned film and directly from the 1Ds showed far better results at 24"x16" prints from the 1Ds--and then I realized I'd been shooting the 1Ds at ISO 400. My jaw dropped.
It turns out that the size of the scan stops being meaningful because of film grain, and that the amount of film grain turns out to make more of a difference in producing large prints than you'd expect from the "line pairs per inch" measurements. The grain just kills you trying to make enlargements, the cleanliness of the 1Ds image results in larger prints that come closer to very high-qulilty medium-format prints than 35mm.
I did a quick "review of the 1Ds for film photographers", it still needs some work, but you're welcome to read it.
The price tag is large for the 1Ds. For me, that's not an issue, it pays for itself in reduced film and processing costs in a year or so--and I get better results--and I get better flexiblity.
To my eye, sensors have well surpassed color film. Black and white is going to be closer, but ... I don't think you should rely (if you are, I don't mean to put words in your mouth) on "megapixels" from film scans as being comparable to "megapixels" from digital sensors directly. Do the experiment, you might be surprised.
Channel surfing:
do {
tuner->nextChannel();
} while ((key = remote->waitForKey(1)) == NULL);
(Yeah, I probably wouldn't use C++ syntax for my TV, but you get the idea.)
FYI, Personal Function 31 is a mode, the signing happens automatically after you take the picture if that mode is on, you can't just ask it to sign after the picture is taken.
Ranging makes things look different too, as does some stuff about how we see edges, and also some special stuff about how wee see shadows, there's lots of weird post-processing. Color is also weird and subjective, take a look at Land's Retinex theory. It's amazing how much what we see really isn't what we see.
*grin* Never said I could type. :)