I dislike the 3D movies as well. Though, in my case, it was because of how they played with the depth of field. Much of Avatar was stunningly beautiful, but half of the time my ADD mind wanted to look at things that Cameron didn't want me to look at, and were thus out of focus. The strain of trying to focus on things that my brain was telling me I should be able to focus on, but couldn't, drove me nuts.
From a tech perspective, the most amazing part of this shut down is that, from what I read, GE was still using the same machine to make the bulbs that they first built, some 80 years ago.
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.
'Why?' asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
'Well, I'm a panda', he says, at the door. 'Look it up.'
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. 'Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.'
I've actually noticed myself becoming extremely careful about punctuation. If you get your punctuation wrong when programming, all sorts of bad things happen. English is just a natural extension of this.
Unfortunately, a trained human geologist could have done everything that these probes have done, within 2 or 3 hours of setting foot on Mars. The robots simply *can't* do things as well as humans can. Think about that... Opportunity and Spirit have been doing fantastic science on Mars for the past 5 or 6 years, and all that work could have done by a trained human within a few hours.
Don't get me wrong, there are situations where they make sense. Putting a human in orbit around Jupiter, to be irradiated by high energy particles for a few years, would be an amazingly stupid thing to do. But don't kid yourself that the robots can explore Mars or the Moon as well as humans could.
And there was a great big fizzing sound as his device failed to accomplish it's task with was either a detonation or an incendiary intended to burn the plane out of the sky.
Except that he did accomplish the task. They've caused significant disruption, fear, and economic damage to the western world, all for the cost of a plane ticket and a few dollars in chemicals.
Re:5 Megapixel camera?!? Why this thing again?
on
iPhone 4 Rumors Rumble
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Given the lenses that most of these camera phones use, typically 1 megapixel is more than enough. These cameras are Diffraction LImited Systems and thus throwing more pixels at it in the same size solves nothing.
To put it in simple language, the resolution limit of the camera is due to the diameter of the lens, not the number of pixels on the sensor. This is part of the reason why Canon went from the 14Megapixel sensor on the G10 to an 11 megapixel sensor on the G11. The G10 was diffraction limited, while the G11 roughly matched between the lens system and sensor. Thus, the two will produce pictures with equivalent resolution, despite one having fewer pixels than the other.
Even if the actions of these people were nefarious, which it doesn't seem to be (playing with different scenarios nd what not) to claim that all the reserch is bogus because of it is a logical fallacy at best, and outright stupidity and ignorance at worst. The argument basically goes lik ethis: "Johnny runs Linux. Johnny also stole Windows 7, therefore all linux useres steal Windows 7."
There are dozens of independant sources of data, and independant researchers. I would be far, far more suspect if it all matched up perfectly. It doesn't, and that's good. It promotes discussion within the scientific community.
The "skeptics" in this case just don't know what they're talking about, and are guilty of fraud in and of themselves for claiming that a single case can be extrapolated to the entire body of research at large.
Guy I know had his Volkswagen TDI go into true runaway on him. The bearings on his turbocharger failed early, causing engine oil to get aerosolized into his air intake stream. Being a diesel engine, it quite happily burned the engine oil, promptly sending the engine into full runaway untill it seized up due to massive over-revs, and lack of oil.
There is a butterfly valve on the air intake designed to keep this from happening (chokes the air from the engine) but I think it might have sucked that through too.
I'll stick to voting with pencil, paper, and hand counted ballots. Of course, we in Canada have the advantage that binding referendums are unconstitutional (It's violation of parliamentary supremacy). Thus all we vote for is our representative. Of course this seems to be happening every 18 months, but with four political parties, this tends to happen.:)
Oh, and for those who are wondering, each ballot is hand counted, in triplicate, with scrutineers from each of the candidates on said ballot in attendance. It takes about 4 or 5 hours to count 10 000 000 ballots, and recounts rarely change the results by more than 1 or 2 votes per district.
What good would confiscating the device after the fact do? If these are really "high security" establishments as you say, wouldn't they be concerned that you might "tamper" with the tag, use the camera to photograph or record video of sensitive materials or discussions, then encrypt and transmit said photos or videos to a far-off website, all before leaving the establishment? Confiscating the device at that point would be like closing the barn door after the horses escaped.
Anything where a tamper resistant sticker isn't sufficient won't allow the device in the first place. Personally, if I had the choice of locking up my phone, or risking jail time because a sticker on my phone got damaged, I'll lock it up.
Most high security places I have been don't allow any outside technology to begin with. You walk in the door, lock your phone, USB stick, and whatever else into a locker and take the key. Any remaining bags (Women's purses etc) are hand-searched.
When you're in a truly secure environment, it's the only way to be sure. On the other hand, I was working on a base once, and after several trips through the security checkpoint, the guards got annoyed and just slapped an "Unclassified" sticker on my laptop.
I once had to get to job by hitching rides in CH-53 helicopters. Those things are nasty to be a passenger on.
1) It's a flying tin sauna. It's 120 inside, no ventilation, and you have 20+ sweaty guys, all wearing 30+lbs of body armor.
2) As you fly along, you're slowly roasted in a fine mist of hydraulic fluid. CH-53s are so bad that if they're not leaking hydraulic fluid, it means they've run out.
3) Did I mention that they're incredibly loud?
4) Oh yeah, the people shooting at you from below also sucks.
Not really. All the standard conventions are kept because they're damned convenient. They allow the photographer to make quick judgements on how to setup the camera in order to achieve the results he/she wants.
It all boils down to reciprocity. If I go from F/4 to F/5.6, I immediately know that I need to double my exposure time if I want to expose correctly. If I can't afford the extra exposure time (Moving subject for example), I can bump the ISO up to compensate. The latter, in fact, is the huge win when it comes to digital. I can effectively change films on the fly, rather than being stuck with what I started out with.
Remember, light, as with sound, is inherently logarithmic. One step of exposure is either a doubling or halving of the amount of light reaching your sensor (or film). To organize things any other way just doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and would make life much more difficult for photographers.
That would be going from 4mp to 16mp. Going from 4 to 8mp should only double your image size on disk
Unless they also changed the number of bits per pixel. Say you have a 4MP camera at 8 bits per pixel (We're talking raw here, so each pixel only has a single data channel) then you go to an 8MP camera with 14 bits per pixel. That's going to almost quadruple the file size of your RAW files.
Seriously, if you think they are bad in the work place, try being in an environment where they aren't fired if they can't mesh with the rest of the group. I'm fine with self confidence, but the arrogance of some of the students is more than frustrating. Since they think they have it all under control, they don't care about learning some of the lessons that college tries to teach them.
My best lesson in University came in the form of failing four out of five courses in one semester. It completely destroyed the arrogance I had going in, and forced me to really consider whether this was something I really wanted to do. In the end, I stuck with it, retook the classes, and graduated with a solid B- average.
I truely believe that everyone should fail at least one course in their lives. It's tough at the time, but in the end, it's good for the soul.
I'm now in my first full job after college, and bounce around all over the planet, fixing and installing customer systems. I am damned lucky and I don't regret a thing.
I personally quite liked Sneakers. They got the bit about factorization being the key to cryptography right. Obviously the stuff at the end when they're using the chip is BS, but the whole principle of someone discovering a device capable of efficiently factoring very large numbers was bang on.
Re:Why people watch movies..
on
Daemon
·
· Score: 1
With "The Matrix" and similar movies, they make the world so radically different that the suspension of disbelief is an all or nothing:
... If only Morpheus had held up a Pentium rather than a Duracel, the movie would have been perfect...
Yes, but if a Canadian firm has hired the US firm, the US telemarketers must follow the Canadian registry, if they do not, their client (the one that's trying to sell stuff to you) is liable to be penalized. They just need to start enforcing and applying the fines.
In Canada, at least, the people that can be fined not only includes the telemarketing firm itself, but also the company that hired them.
If a company in Canada hires a telemarketing firm, even if they're in India, and they violate the Do Not Call List, the company in Canada is subject to a $1500 fine per violation.
Why not just take every existing IPv4 address and make it an alias for the same IPv6 address, but with 5 zeros in front of it? And declare that the owners of those IPv4 addresses now own the corresponding IPv6 addresses?
That's basically what 6to4 tunneling does, except that the ipv4 address defines a/64 subnet.:)
I know of many universities that have/16's, and really, same situation - do they really need 65k addresses? Labs, residence PCs, wifi laptops, are all assigned public IPs, and then behind a firewall so nothing is accepted inbound anyways. These systems could easily be assigned private addresses and stuck behind NAT.
You are missing part of the point of the "public" IPs. By definition, public IP addresses are globally unique. This makes it easy to integrate or even just link two separate networks, since you can be absolutely sure that there will not be duplicated IP addresses. You try integrating or linking two separate, private networks that are both running on 192.168.0.0/24:)
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I dislike the 3D movies as well. Though, in my case, it was because of how they played with the depth of field. Much of Avatar was stunningly beautiful, but half of the time my ADD mind wanted to look at things that Cameron didn't want me to look at, and were thus out of focus. The strain of trying to focus on things that my brain was telling me I should be able to focus on, but couldn't, drove me nuts.
From a tech perspective, the most amazing part of this shut down is that, from what I read, GE was still using the same machine to make the bulbs that they first built, some 80 years ago.
That's why I never step it up to Red Alert.
Yeah, I always hate changing the bulbs. I stick to Purple Alert most of the time because I'm lazy.
To quote the book of the above title:
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.
'Why?' asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
'Well, I'm a panda', he says, at the door. 'Look it up.'
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. 'Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.'
I've actually noticed myself becoming extremely careful about punctuation. If you get your punctuation wrong when programming, all sorts of bad things happen. English is just a natural extension of this.
Unfortunately, a trained human geologist could have done everything that these probes have done, within 2 or 3 hours of setting foot on Mars. The robots simply *can't* do things as well as humans can. Think about that... Opportunity and Spirit have been doing fantastic science on Mars for the past 5 or 6 years, and all that work could have done by a trained human within a few hours.
Don't get me wrong, there are situations where they make sense. Putting a human in orbit around Jupiter, to be irradiated by high energy particles for a few years, would be an amazingly stupid thing to do. But don't kid yourself that the robots can explore Mars or the Moon as well as humans could.
And there was a great big fizzing sound as his device failed to accomplish it's task with was either a detonation or an incendiary intended to burn the plane out of the sky.
Except that he did accomplish the task. They've caused significant disruption, fear, and economic damage to the western world, all for the cost of a plane ticket and a few dollars in chemicals.
Given the lenses that most of these camera phones use, typically 1 megapixel is more than enough. These cameras are Diffraction LImited Systems and thus throwing more pixels at it in the same size solves nothing.
To put it in simple language, the resolution limit of the camera is due to the diameter of the lens, not the number of pixels on the sensor. This is part of the reason why Canon went from the 14Megapixel sensor on the G10 to an 11 megapixel sensor on the G11. The G10 was diffraction limited, while the G11 roughly matched between the lens system and sensor. Thus, the two will produce pictures with equivalent resolution, despite one having fewer pixels than the other.
There are dozens of independant sources of data, and independant researchers. I would be far, far more suspect if it all matched up perfectly. It doesn't, and that's good. It promotes discussion within the scientific community.
The "skeptics" in this case just don't know what they're talking about, and are guilty of fraud in and of themselves for claiming that a single case can be extrapolated to the entire body of research at large.
There is a butterfly valve on the air intake designed to keep this from happening (chokes the air from the engine) but I think it might have sucked that through too.
I'll stick to voting with pencil, paper, and hand counted ballots. Of course, we in Canada have the advantage that binding referendums are unconstitutional (It's violation of parliamentary supremacy). Thus all we vote for is our representative. Of course this seems to be happening every 18 months, but with four political parties, this tends to happen. :)
Oh, and for those who are wondering, each ballot is hand counted, in triplicate, with scrutineers from each of the candidates on said ballot in attendance. It takes about 4 or 5 hours to count 10 000 000 ballots, and recounts rarely change the results by more than 1 or 2 votes per district.
The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
Well, given that in Curling, Beer is a performance enhancing drug, it's my kind of sport!
What good would confiscating the device after the fact do? If these are really "high security" establishments as you say, wouldn't they be concerned that you might "tamper" with the tag, use the camera to photograph or record video of sensitive materials or discussions, then encrypt and transmit said photos or videos to a far-off website, all before leaving the establishment? Confiscating the device at that point would be like closing the barn door after the horses escaped.
Anything where a tamper resistant sticker isn't sufficient won't allow the device in the first place. Personally, if I had the choice of locking up my phone, or risking jail time because a sticker on my phone got damaged, I'll lock it up.
When you're in a truly secure environment, it's the only way to be sure. On the other hand, I was working on a base once, and after several trips through the security checkpoint, the guards got annoyed and just slapped an "Unclassified" sticker on my laptop.
Which mode? I'm guessing CW, but that information would help. :P
1) It's a flying tin sauna. It's 120 inside, no ventilation, and you have 20+ sweaty guys, all wearing 30+lbs of body armor.
2) As you fly along, you're slowly roasted in a fine mist of hydraulic fluid. CH-53s are so bad that if they're not leaking hydraulic fluid, it means they've run out.
3) Did I mention that they're incredibly loud?
4) Oh yeah, the people shooting at you from below also sucks.
Not really. All the standard conventions are kept because they're damned convenient. They allow the photographer to make quick judgements on how to setup the camera in order to achieve the results he/she wants.
It all boils down to reciprocity. If I go from F/4 to F/5.6, I immediately know that I need to double my exposure time if I want to expose correctly. If I can't afford the extra exposure time (Moving subject for example), I can bump the ISO up to compensate. The latter, in fact, is the huge win when it comes to digital. I can effectively change films on the fly, rather than being stuck with what I started out with.
Remember, light, as with sound, is inherently logarithmic. One step of exposure is either a doubling or halving of the amount of light reaching your sensor (or film). To organize things any other way just doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and would make life much more difficult for photographers.
That would be going from 4mp to 16mp. Going from 4 to 8mp should only double your image size on disk
Unless they also changed the number of bits per pixel. Say you have a 4MP camera at 8 bits per pixel (We're talking raw here, so each pixel only has a single data channel) then you go to an 8MP camera with 14 bits per pixel. That's going to almost quadruple the file size of your RAW files.
Seriously, if you think they are bad in the work place, try being in an environment where they aren't fired if they can't mesh with the rest of the group. I'm fine with self confidence, but the arrogance of some of the students is more than frustrating. Since they think they have it all under control, they don't care about learning some of the lessons that college tries to teach them.
My best lesson in University came in the form of failing four out of five courses in one semester. It completely destroyed the arrogance I had going in, and forced me to really consider whether this was something I really wanted to do. In the end, I stuck with it, retook the classes, and graduated with a solid B- average. I truely believe that everyone should fail at least one course in their lives. It's tough at the time, but in the end, it's good for the soul. I'm now in my first full job after college, and bounce around all over the planet, fixing and installing customer systems. I am damned lucky and I don't regret a thing.
I personally quite liked Sneakers. They got the bit about factorization being the key to cryptography right. Obviously the stuff at the end when they're using the chip is BS, but the whole principle of someone discovering a device capable of efficiently factoring very large numbers was bang on.
With "The Matrix" and similar movies, they make the world so radically different that the suspension of disbelief is an all or nothing:
... If only Morpheus had held up a Pentium rather than a Duracel, the movie would have been perfect...
Yes, but if a Canadian firm has hired the US firm, the US telemarketers must follow the Canadian registry, if they do not, their client (the one that's trying to sell stuff to you) is liable to be penalized. They just need to start enforcing and applying the fines.
In Canada, at least, the people that can be fined not only includes the telemarketing firm itself, but also the company that hired them. If a company in Canada hires a telemarketing firm, even if they're in India, and they violate the Do Not Call List, the company in Canada is subject to a $1500 fine per violation.
Why not just take every existing IPv4 address and make it an alias for the same IPv6 address, but with 5 zeros in front of it? And declare that the owners of those IPv4 addresses now own the corresponding IPv6 addresses?
That's basically what 6to4 tunneling does, except that the ipv4 address defines a /64 subnet. :)
I know of many universities that have /16's, and really, same situation - do they really need 65k addresses? Labs, residence PCs, wifi laptops, are all assigned public IPs, and then behind a firewall so nothing is accepted inbound anyways. These systems could easily be assigned private addresses and stuck behind NAT.
You are missing part of the point of the "public" IPs. By definition, public IP addresses are globally unique. This makes it easy to integrate or even just link two separate networks, since you can be absolutely sure that there will not be duplicated IP addresses. You try integrating or linking two separate, private networks that are both running on 192.168.0.0/24 :)