The problem with it being opt-in is that it also makes it lazy.
Most people don't put any thought into whether they want to be a donor or not, and whatever religious or superstitial concerns may arise, because the question of being a donor or not never affects them in an opt-in scenario. After all, if you're not a donor, you don't have to think about parts of your body being used to help others. It's easy and lazy.
If you make it opt-out, people will be forced to think about this and make a decision to either remain a donor, or opt out of it.
If it weren't likely to elicit "ZOMG Teh Constutition!" responses, I'd say this should actually really be handled in high school or college. Have people decide actively to either be a donor, or -not- be a donor; no 'default' status being presumed (with younger children falling under the wisdom (with any luck) of their parents/guardians).
If opt-in is the norm.. very well. But I do think that those who choose not to be a donor should in fact be treated differently when it comes to receiving a donor. I wouldn't go as far as saying that they shouldn't get the donor organ (or skin graft or whatever).. but perhaps a donor recipient should automatically be made a donor themselves. After all, it's not 100% their own body they'd be deciding about anymore, and at least somebody whose organ(s) you received -did- choose to be a donor.
But what if you want to die, but not kill yourself?
If you are in incredible agony with no hope for survival, you may wish to die because death would be better than the agony. ( up for discussion, usually from religious views, but let's say that the person in question believes so ) That wouldn't qualify as being suicidal on its own. You may not want to kill yourself.
In the case of this story.. this guy obviously doesn't particularly want to kill himself. He just knows that he's dying relatively soon and that when that time comes, his organs will be of no use to anybody. He wants to donate those organs before it's too late. The fact that he'll die sooner in the process is a consequence, but not - presumably - his goal.
If killing himself was the goal, there'd be much easier and direct methods.
However the biggest problem I see with merging stop signs with yield signs is that some people tend to believe that a yield sign means they just need to try to merge with traffic, not stop and yield right of way.
So people believe that a sign that means one thing (stop and yield right of way) means something else (try to merge with traffic). Obviously that's a lack in their driving education (insofar as driving on backroads with daddy can be called a driving education).
But then again, can you really blame them, when you are absolutely guilty of the same thing? After all, a STOP sign means you need to STOP moving. It really doesn't get any simpler than that. Yet you interpret it as a "slow down to some variable speed that I, myself, decide is quite slow enough thank-you-very-much".. and then feel 'bugged' if you get a fine for it.
Or maybe they just 'own' (hold copyright on) that 8 page in-depth article on soldiers who fell victim to roadside IEDs, written from hours of interviews with locals, the soldiers themselves, their superiors, the soldiers' family, a real life account of being a convoy where the 2nd vehicle in the convoy was hit just in front of the 3rd with the reporter in place, with weeks of travel.
I guess if the time, effort, money spent and risk taken are worth zilch to you* - then absolutely.. go copy/paste that onto your Joe Blow World News site and rake in the ad impressions/clicks.
Just don't go crying if the copyright holder comes collecting.
Even if it's filler pieces from the AP/Reuters/etc. - guess what, you can license those.
When you don't feel like licensing, you can still summarize / extract / etc. If you're not sure where to draw the line in quoting articles / providing summaries, then maybe you shouldn't be running a 'news website'.
I thought it was a mildly interesting read.. it seems the author has two main complaints...
1. the design of guns being unrealistic He argues that 'future gun'-designs should be evolutions based on current gun designs, aiming to address problems with those current designs and integrating that into the 'future gun' design. On one hand, that makes sense. On the other, look at the P90 - that doesn't look anywhere near the typical AK-47 or or M16. If you've never seen one before, you might think it -is- a 'future gun'. So obviously as long as the designers design a gun that could theoretically work, all bets are off as to what it actually looks like. Not to mention that this only really applies to guns shooting bullets anyway - and even there you've got things like the MetalStorm that operate radically different from conventional guns.
2. the use of the guns being unrealistic Recoil would tend to ruin the 'fun' of most games. A sniper rifle that gets you near-zero accuracy (floating barrel) when on the run / flying through the air would force those people to camp - and although that's exactly what snipers do, camping tends to be frowned upon in gaming However, as another commenter posted below, it couldn't hurt to have reload mechanisms work as they do in real life -if- you're using a real life gun design in the first place. They also argued about the sound effects, though.. I've shot a few guns - I'll take the game/'Hollywood' sound effects anytime as far as entertainment goes.
I hate it so much when I'm just trying install PDFCreator or some other GPL'd tool and part of the install process involves a default click box to also install Yahoo's toolbar in all my browsers. It's great to see companies back particular open source projects but I do not care for companies that take hold of the reigns and/or use it to propagate their own proprietary tools.
Aren't those Yahoo! Toolbar, Google Toolbar, Google Earth, Ask.com default homepage, StarOffice etc. options implemented by the developer by choice in order to get a kickback (some fractions of dollars, I suppose) - rather than the companies behind these solutions 'taking hold of' the projects and inserting them?
Although I agree in general that nuclear is the way to go for the short and mid-term (and switched electricity providers to one that offers 'red' electricity (as opposed to 'green'), your statement..
Peak Uranium? So then we move to thorium, or get uranium out of the sea, or burn our spent fuel. This is a solvable issue.
..could be applied to people's stance on oil as well: "Peak Oil? So then we move to natural gas, or get the oil out of shale, or recover oil from plastics. This is a solvable issue."
What shocks a person depends on the person and their experiences (direct or indirect).
I, myself, enjoy fictional movies in which people meet peculiar deaths - the Saw franchise, the Final Destination franchise, Mindhunters, Untraceable and to a lesser extent the more recent Unthinkable.. that sort of thing. With me a hundreds of thousands to millions of others. As a result, I do think I've become desensitized a little. The news showing images of people burning, getting shot, a protester on the street with brain matter where it certainly shouldn't be.. just doesn't shock me. I wouldn't say that seeing such movies has trivialized real life events, as I don't go unaffected - it just doesn't 'shock' me.
On the other hand.. when some guy dropped a dog off a bridge with a friend making a video of it, the dog obviously in pain and unable to get up again, and uploading that to some site for the world to see so as to boast about it... and similarly, when a military man decided throwing a puppy off of a cliff was a good idea (I seem to recall the excuse being that they can't take in and care for all the hundreds of stray dogs and blablabla.. what, a bullet to the head was a waste of a bullet?) - that shocked me. Heck, they enraged me for a bit.
I certainly couldn't do the job described in this article; but not because of whatever corpses of people I might see, but because of the animal cruelty I might see* - and who knows what else.
* in before the "you should see what they do to cows before they become your hamburger" crowd.. I have, thanks. If you can't see the difference between regulated killing for food - even where that food is a luxury rather than a necessity - and killing for e.g. a misguided sense of entertainment, there's no point in even debating that topic; but it comes down to this.. if a cow gets tossed off of a ledge 'for fun', I will feel just as enraged - and if a culture thinks dogs/cats/etc. make for delicious meals, I don't condemn them either, regardless of my disapproval.
Translated (Google fails due to colloquial word usage) "Is Jobs yacking about the reception on competing devices to justify his own design error? I must seeing it wrong*" ( * "I must be misinterpreting", though that would typically be written as "Ik zal het wel verkeerd begrijpen") http://twitter.com/markmoons/status/18702074270
Why this push for everything to be 3-D? It was a stupid novelty years ago, and its no less stupid now.
*shakes his cane*
sonny, my computer only has two speakers attached to it - I don't know why you youngsters insisted on this, this.. surrounding sound.. it was a stupid novelty when I was a kid, and it's no less stupid now! Now get offa my lawn!
Except... I can still watch the movie with either its included stereo track or the mix produced from the surround tracks. Why would I complain at all?
So it is with (stereoscopic) 3D as well - don't like it? Don't watch it - there's certainly zero -technical- reason you can't watch just the left view, just the right view, or a per-scene decision (not specced, afaik) of which view to take. And you can do this on that 20" CRT you picked up in 1992 that only takes composite input, rather than having to endure HD video and suffering the consequences.
In other words.. what is your complaint about, exactly? How is this push for 3D affecting you?
Why this push for everything to be 3-D?
Part money (see other replies), part because they can, part because they should - this goes mostly for movies.. it's much easier to start with a 3D pipeline than trying to make a 2D movie 3D - and part because consumers want it; when people themselves are getting 3D TVs / displays, it follows naturally that they might want to take 3D pictures - thus SONY's new batch of P&S cameras doing the stereo thing as part of its panorama sweep mode and other manufacturers coming out with cameras with 2 lenses, for example. It may be one of those things where a product is made that people didn't even know they wanted, but such it is.
It was a stupid novelty years ago, and its no less stupid now.
I disagree.. not with the stupid novelty part so much - that's a subjective thing; I've always rather enjoyed stereoscopic content and am a stereoscopic photography amateur myself (2 separate, synced, cameras for greater depth perception control) - but with the idea that it's no less stupid.
It was a lot more stupid in the 80's as there was no reasonable viewing medium outside of the theater - and very often that was a special theater as well. The only way to view at home was with red/green, red/blue, orange/cyan, etc. filter glasses. That was a heck of a lot more stupid than the full color experience you can have in the home now with shutter / polarized glasses or even lenticular / parallax barrier displays. The only thing that came close were the ViewMaster reels - and those were still images with relatively poor resolution, rather than animated content - let alone interactive content.
3D isn't a short-lived fad - it may be a niche feature (just like surround sound), and you may not be a part of the group who enjoys that particular niche feature, but to say it's no less stupid now than it was years ago would be ignoring the vast technical improvements and consumer-level availability that exists during this current push which were all but non-existent during any previous pushes. Whether it will be a longer-term fad if it turns out consumer uptake does end up on the low side - most likely due to the "I don't want to wear 'funny' glasses" effect - is another matter. Part of me hopes it will be - perhaps they'll re-focus their efforts on True HDR displays instead;)
In your black-and-white world, I'm sure that things work that way.
In your world, you shouldn't complain about people taking pictures through your windows. You willingly radiate electromagnetic radiation - in the form of photons - so anything that can be seen through your windows is not private at all. Should have closed your curtains.
In your world, you shouldn't complain about people using parabolic microphones to listen to your conversations with another person in your household. You willingly make the surfaces vibrate, so anything that an outsider manages to pick up is not private at all. Should have use 2-foot thick reinforced concrete and lined the inside with sound absorbing padding.
In your world, you shouldn't complain if somebody goes through your trash and digs up everything from bills to medicine prescriptions. You willingly discarded it so callously, so it is not private at all. You should have incinerated it.
In your world, you shouldn't complain if private security companies band together and employ facial recognition among other to track your movements wherever their services have coverage, selling this data to yet other companies. After all, you willingly set foot outside. You should have gotten a teleworking job and gotten your groceries home-delivered.
Fortunately, in the real world, things aren't so black and white. Things are many shades of gray and probably all the colors of the rainbow, too. In the real world, we do define some rules, laws, that curtail these sorts of activities one way or another - generally in the interest of people's privacy.. even where in your world there would be none. It is in that real world that Australia has seen fit to set privacy laws (Privacy Act) under which Google's activities are a no-no.
Whether or not those people should have known better, and should have secured their WiFi, or whether the people whose data has been collected even care that it occurred.. is a moot issue for the conclusion reached by the Australian privacy commissioner.
That person would see much the same as the patients with AMD. That is to say a loss of vision in the central region of your visual range (in the case of a non-AMD person: because the telescope is in the way, if nothing else), and all vision that -would- have fallen into the central region instead being expanded out toward the outer regions, essentially giving you a ring or donut shaped view of the world. The article also mentions that if the person with AMD still has a good eye as well, that eye would be left untreated to provide for peripheral vision. That implies that with the device, peripheral vision would also be, to an extent, lost.
blatant as it may be, I read the article three times now - and Soilworker, you did well not to bother. I'm pretty sure the answer is not in there.
This doesn't seem to be about square pixels in terms of display technology (where hexagonal pixels may indeed be superior). It also doesn't seem to be about picture acquisition. On the face of it, it seems to be talking about mapping rudimentary shapes to pixels so that they conform to a most-likely contrast-matching scenario with regard to surrounding pixels. Which some other posters here already pointed out with posts about JPEG and the like - but it's not really comparable to that either. Not in technique and not in performance.
At best, as far as I can take away from it, it could be a different way to display an image when zoomed in / a technique that could be used when enlarging an image to provide greater apparent detail (although you wouldn't want to enlarge it - you'd want to store the masks found with the original image for display).
The results in the news blurb look pretty decent and if nothing else 'different' from other 'smart scaling' methods, so it's worth exploring. But what this has to do with square pixels as we're mostly familiar with them, I have no idea.
Well, that's an oft-heard complaint with any open source project, of course.. especially the free-as-in-beer ones; "You have the code, YOU make the changes if you think they're so important!" - completely ignoring that the user may not exactly be a programmer. Even if you then say "enough of this" and pay somebody to make those changes for you (which your father could possibly do - perhaps get together with other people who also think it's a good idea and pool together the money), the odds of getting those changes included in the official distribution may be slim; meaning that for every update to the main version, the custom code may need review to make sure it still works when re-compiled. Before somebody suggests forking.. no, not everybody has the stamina to fork the project and eventually stage a coup or, by sheer popularity, have the main project integrate the changes after all. I rather suspect that parent poster's father wouldn't be interested in such a thing either.
On the other hand, I guess us end-users to have to keep in mind as well that the project's programmers aren't exactly on our payroll to do our bidding. Between my wishes for The GIMP and those of thousands of others, I'm pretty sure they have little incentive to focus specifically on mine when they already lay out active development plans.
This is really not that much different from closed source counterparts. If I ask Adobe to -please- let me just change the positioning of an image within a print page layout -despite- the fact that "center" is checked (and automatically unchecking that option if I indeed change that positioning)... the odds of Adobe making it so on a minor interim release are slim to none.
In your father's specific case, though.. did he happen to publish these pages online somewhere? If nothing else, he might find like-minded end-users who can, together, have more sway.
Obviously one shouldn't expect to learn a different application through-and-through in just a day.
On the other hand.. if e.g. Google Docs did not use a bolded B button to turn text bold, like every other application going with that defacto standard, but instead went with a normally-written T - for Thick - which those in the graphics industry might instead think is to insert a text field, I could well-imagine that the learning curve would be much greater than it had to be.
As such, I'm far more interested in -exactly- what problems they faced, rather than the uninformative single-sentence conclusion, and hope that they plan on communicating these problems back to the developers, if not already done so.
I suppose that would make #7 - an application or driver sending a 'back' command directly to the browser (no idea if that's still DDE or somesuch).
Although it's also possible that the mouse driver simply fakes keystrokes (such as the Backspace key) when that button is pressed.. in which case, I'm not sure that would count as a different FireFox method so much as an input device method. ( my laptop has a little 4-way direction button that can be configured to have left = Back as well )
Is that in FireFox by default? It doesn't seem to do anything on this machine (Win/FF3.6.6). I know I can add it by using e.g. http://www.mousegestures.org/ , but do add-ons count?
A sibling poster already mentioned the alt+left arrow.. I wonder how many ways there actually are...
1. Back button 2. Alt+Left Arrow 3. menubar: History - Back (and thus: Alt+s, B) 4. Right-click (context menu) on any blank area of a page - Back (and thus: Right-click, B) 5. Backspace button (maybe Win only?) 6. Shift+Mousewheel Down
Well, don't let the facts get in the way of a good indignant rant, but in point of fact the members of the class are notified by mail.
So, wait... how are the class members determined, then? How do they know where they should be sending these mails?
Now, for an iPhone 4, presuming it's activated, I suppose they -can- get the address information if they really wanted to as the address information is tied to it one way or another so that I can be properly billed for the plan (which is tied to the phone for now).
But let's say it's for some random laptop where address information is not required and not even asked. As far as I understand it - and please do correct me if I'm wrong - I -am- a member of the class. So how are they going to be mailing me?
Unless you're saying that you're -not- a member of the class *unless* you either A. get such a mailing or B. 'opt in' (join the class members).
Health bars look dumb, and remind you that you're not playing a person but some abstraction of a person.
That's what I liked about an old DOS game; instead of health bars and overall "either you're still healthy or you're dead" mentality, there was a small map in the bottom of the screen which showed exactly where you got hit. Hit in the leg? You didn't run so fast anymore. Hit in the arms? There goes your aim.
I wish I could recall the title.. I was going to write 'Cyclones' here, but a quick review of a youtube gameplay video tells me that wasn't it (Cyclones instead being the awesome title where aim and walking direction were semi-decoupled; also the same year SSI released Dark Legions.. ahh, memories).
Presumably the user will just jam the batteries in whichever way they please in their frustration and.. hey presto, it works.
I suppose a more serious side-effect would be that they might start thinking this holds true for -any- battery compartment, and subsequently kill their device.
it's one of the "so simple anybody could have thought of it" patents
I remember *some* devices that, instead of the cheap flat plate (positive contact) and spring (negative contact) configuration, had the housing built in such a manner that for the negative plate (which was semi-springy) it was full width, while for the positive plate it was shielded by the housing to just slightly over the width of the protruding positive contact of the AA/AAA battery.
That way, the battery could only be inserted one way. It solves the same big problem of inserting batteries the wrong way around and either the device not working, or worse.
It doesn't solve the "I wish I could put the battery either which way around so I don't have to use my square-peg-in-round-hole 18-month-old brain" problem, though - and it's still a fairly clever design. Now to see how well it holds up in mass production where tolerances of fitting such things in the housings are often seen as +-2mm and everything moves, twists and turns.
This is specifically for battery compartments with a physical parallel configuration, rather than a series configuration. ( 'physical configuration' as in the batteries laying side-by-side, rather than end-to-end, so the batteries' poles never directly touch eachother; unrelated to the electrical circuitry's configuration )
I'm trying to recall the last time I've seen a physical series configuration; but I just realized my old-ass flashlight counts as one. ( it's been replaced years ago by a proper wind-up for emergency cases and a decent Maglite-like one with a rechargable set for more frequent/high intensity beam use )
Yes, but everybody is part of the class -unless- they opt out. That means that if they just happen to never even hear about the class action for them to opt out.. guess what? tough luck.
Most heterosexual couples wait several years in between starting their relationship and getting married - during which period they won't be entitled to this perk, but homosexual employees will.
There's a flaw in that argument, which becomes clear if you re-introduce the redundancy:
homosexual employees will be entitled to this perk during the period in which homosexual couples wait several years in between starting their relationship and getting married
Whoops. Homosexual couples still can't -get- married in most states.. most notably California.
I do agree that Google's stance on heterosexual couples is oversimplifying the issue...
heterosexual couples can avoid the added tax by marrying
Although I do see many couples marrying, divorcing, re-marrying, divorcing, and so forth and so on, I still don't think that marriage - or rather, any union which comes with legal and corporate ramifications abound, should be treated so callously.
But the basic problem is that homosexuals cannot get married or signed into a union that is (federally) recognized and comes with the exact same benefits -and- obligations as a marriage between heterosexuals. Fix that one, and the issue described in this article becomes moot.
The larger issue of whether or not two people living together and who get some benefits (the domestic partner health benefits) should, in fact, be similarly exempt from this tax, is a bit more difficult to figure out. Apparently those taxes are linked directly to those health benefits.. so one way not to pay them is by rejecting those health benefits. Something tells me that it'd be wiser to stick with the benefits and deal with the taxes. Question is.. why do those taxes magically disappear once you're married?
But then you're talking about a completely different field ( the 'field' I was referring to was -literally- a field.. with crops ) of use.
Similarly a photographer is going to want a display with a high resolution because although zooming is all good and well, it's going to be printed at a certain size - and it's at that size that the details are going to matter.. not that somebody can see a speck of dust when zoomed in 20x on the original digital back output.
There's certainly fields where it is *highly desirable*, just as it is -generally- desirable. But for the purpose stated, a higher density display is far from the suggested 'required', and a 320x240 display -is- sufficient for remote diagnosis if the picture you're sent is high enough in resolution (and taken in proper focus) to determine the best course of action. But if you're on-site, then (currently) nothing beats your eyes and being able to look at the plants directly / through a magnifying glass, and the pixel density of whatever phone you're carrying becomes moot.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with it being opt-in is that it also makes it lazy.
Most people don't put any thought into whether they want to be a donor or not, and whatever religious or superstitial concerns may arise, because the question of being a donor or not never affects them in an opt-in scenario.
After all, if you're not a donor, you don't have to think about parts of your body being used to help others. It's easy and lazy.
If you make it opt-out, people will be forced to think about this and make a decision to either remain a donor, or opt out of it.
If it weren't likely to elicit "ZOMG Teh Constutition!" responses, I'd say this should actually really be handled in high school or college. Have people decide actively to either be a donor, or -not- be a donor; no 'default' status being presumed (with younger children falling under the wisdom (with any luck) of their parents/guardians).
If opt-in is the norm.. very well. But I do think that those who choose not to be a donor should in fact be treated differently when it comes to receiving a donor. I wouldn't go as far as saying that they shouldn't get the donor organ (or skin graft or whatever).. but perhaps a donor recipient should automatically be made a donor themselves. After all, it's not 100% their own body they'd be deciding about anymore, and at least somebody whose organ(s) you received -did- choose to be a donor.
Wanting to kill yourself is being suicidal.
But what if you want to die, but not kill yourself?
If you are in incredible agony with no hope for survival, you may wish to die because death would be better than the agony.
( up for discussion, usually from religious views, but let's say that the person in question believes so )
That wouldn't qualify as being suicidal on its own. You may not want to kill yourself.
In the case of this story.. this guy obviously doesn't particularly want to kill himself. He just knows that he's dying relatively soon and that when that time comes, his organs will be of no use to anybody. He wants to donate those organs before it's too late. The fact that he'll die sooner in the process is a consequence, but not - presumably - his goal.
If killing himself was the goal, there'd be much easier and direct methods.
okay... let's get back to that in a moment...
So people believe that a sign that means one thing (stop and yield right of way) means something else (try to merge with traffic). Obviously that's a lack in their driving education (insofar as driving on backroads with daddy can be called a driving education).
But then again, can you really blame them, when you are absolutely guilty of the same thing? After all, a STOP sign means you need to STOP moving. It really doesn't get any simpler than that. Yet you interpret it as a "slow down to some variable speed that I, myself, decide is quite slow enough thank-you-very-much".. and then feel 'bugged' if you get a fine for it.
Or maybe they just 'own' (hold copyright on) that 8 page in-depth article on soldiers who fell victim to roadside IEDs, written from hours of interviews with locals, the soldiers themselves, their superiors, the soldiers' family, a real life account of being a convoy where the 2nd vehicle in the convoy was hit just in front of the 3rd with the reporter in place, with weeks of travel.
I guess if the time, effort, money spent and risk taken are worth zilch to you* - then absolutely.. go copy/paste that onto your Joe Blow World News site and rake in the ad impressions/clicks.
Just don't go crying if the copyright holder comes collecting.
Even if it's filler pieces from the AP/Reuters/etc. - guess what, you can license those.
When you don't feel like licensing, you can still summarize / extract / etc. If you're not sure where to draw the line in quoting articles / providing summaries, then maybe you shouldn't be running a 'news website'.
( * generic 'you' - not you, specifically )
I thought it was a mildly interesting read.. it seems the author has two main complaints...
1. the design of guns being unrealistic
He argues that 'future gun'-designs should be evolutions based on current gun designs, aiming to address problems with those current designs and integrating that into the 'future gun' design.
On one hand, that makes sense. On the other, look at the P90 - that doesn't look anywhere near the typical AK-47 or or M16. If you've never seen one before, you might think it -is- a 'future gun'. So obviously as long as the designers design a gun that could theoretically work, all bets are off as to what it actually looks like.
Not to mention that this only really applies to guns shooting bullets anyway - and even there you've got things like the MetalStorm that operate radically different from conventional guns.
2. the use of the guns being unrealistic
Recoil would tend to ruin the 'fun' of most games. A sniper rifle that gets you near-zero accuracy (floating barrel) when on the run / flying through the air would force those people to camp - and although that's exactly what snipers do, camping tends to be frowned upon in gaming
However, as another commenter posted below, it couldn't hurt to have reload mechanisms work as they do in real life -if- you're using a real life gun design in the first place. They also argued about the sound effects, though.. I've shot a few guns - I'll take the game/'Hollywood' sound effects anytime as far as entertainment goes.
Aren't those Yahoo! Toolbar, Google Toolbar, Google Earth, Ask.com default homepage, StarOffice etc. options implemented by the developer by choice in order to get a kickback (some fractions of dollars, I suppose) - rather than the companies behind these solutions 'taking hold of' the projects and inserting them?
Although I agree in general that nuclear is the way to go for the short and mid-term (and switched electricity providers to one that offers 'red' electricity (as opposed to 'green'), your statement..
"Peak Oil? So then we move to natural gas, or get the oil out of shale, or recover oil from plastics. This is a solvable issue."
What shocks a person depends on the person and their experiences (direct or indirect).
I, myself, enjoy fictional movies in which people meet peculiar deaths - the Saw franchise, the Final Destination franchise, Mindhunters, Untraceable and to a lesser extent the more recent Unthinkable.. that sort of thing. With me a hundreds of thousands to millions of others. As a result, I do think I've become desensitized a little. The news showing images of people burning, getting shot, a protester on the street with brain matter where it certainly shouldn't be.. just doesn't shock me. I wouldn't say that seeing such movies has trivialized real life events, as I don't go unaffected - it just doesn't 'shock' me.
On the other hand.. when some guy dropped a dog off a bridge with a friend making a video of it, the dog obviously in pain and unable to get up again, and uploading that to some site for the world to see so as to boast about it... and similarly, when a military man decided throwing a puppy off of a cliff was a good idea (I seem to recall the excuse being that they can't take in and care for all the hundreds of stray dogs and blablabla.. what, a bullet to the head was a waste of a bullet?) - that shocked me. Heck, they enraged me for a bit.
I certainly couldn't do the job described in this article; but not because of whatever corpses of people I might see, but because of the animal cruelty I might see* - and who knows what else.
* in before the "you should see what they do to cows before they become your hamburger" crowd.. I have, thanks. If you can't see the difference between regulated killing for food - even where that food is a luxury rather than a necessity - and killing for e.g. a misguided sense of entertainment, there's no point in even debating that topic; but it comes down to this.. if a cow gets tossed off of a ledge 'for fun', I will feel just as enraged - and if a culture thinks dogs/cats/etc. make for delicious meals, I don't condemn them either, regardless of my disapproval.
Mark Moons of HTC Benelux posted his response to twitter.
source: http://tweakers.net/nieuws/68622/mobieltjesmakers-reageren-fel-op-antennevergelijking-van-apple.html
( the comment threads there are a lovely Apple vs The World whinefest )
Translated (Google fails due to colloquial word usage)
"Is Jobs yacking about the reception on competing devices to justify his own design error? I must seeing it wrong*"
( * "I must be misinterpreting", though that would typically be written as "Ik zal het wel verkeerd begrijpen")
http://twitter.com/markmoons/status/18702074270
"....ok, stopped following that fruitlet's sobstory.... got better things to do... he's denigrating the industry."
http://twitter.com/markmoons/status/18702370046
*shakes his cane*
sonny, my computer only has two speakers attached to it - I don't know why you youngsters insisted on this, this.. surrounding sound.. it was a stupid novelty when I was a kid, and it's no less stupid now! Now get offa my lawn!
Except... I can still watch the movie with either its included stereo track or the mix produced from the surround tracks. Why would I complain at all?
So it is with (stereoscopic) 3D as well - don't like it? Don't watch it - there's certainly zero -technical- reason you can't watch just the left view, just the right view, or a per-scene decision (not specced, afaik) of which view to take. And you can do this on that 20" CRT you picked up in 1992 that only takes composite input, rather than having to endure HD video and suffering the consequences.
In other words.. what is your complaint about, exactly? How is this push for 3D affecting you?
Part money (see other replies), part because they can, part because they should - this goes mostly for movies.. it's much easier to start with a 3D pipeline than trying to make a 2D movie 3D - and part because consumers want it; when people themselves are getting 3D TVs / displays, it follows naturally that they might want to take 3D pictures - thus SONY's new batch of P&S cameras doing the stereo thing as part of its panorama sweep mode and other manufacturers coming out with cameras with 2 lenses, for example. It may be one of those things where a product is made that people didn't even know they wanted, but such it is.
I disagree.. not with the stupid novelty part so much - that's a subjective thing; I've always rather enjoyed stereoscopic content and am a stereoscopic photography amateur myself (2 separate, synced, cameras for greater depth perception control) - but with the idea that it's no less stupid.
It was a lot more stupid in the 80's as there was no reasonable viewing medium outside of the theater - and very often that was a special theater as well. The only way to view at home was with red/green, red/blue, orange/cyan, etc. filter glasses. That was a heck of a lot more stupid than the full color experience you can have in the home now with shutter / polarized glasses or even lenticular / parallax barrier displays. The only thing that came close were the ViewMaster reels - and those were still images with relatively poor resolution, rather than animated content - let alone interactive content.
3D isn't a short-lived fad - it may be a niche feature (just like surround sound), and you may not be a part of the group who enjoys that particular niche feature, but to say it's no less stupid now than it was years ago would be ignoring the vast technical improvements and consumer-level availability that exists during this current push which were all but non-existent during any previous pushes. ;)
Whether it will be a longer-term fad if it turns out consumer uptake does end up on the low side - most likely due to the "I don't want to wear 'funny' glasses" effect - is another matter. Part of me hopes it will be - perhaps they'll re-focus their efforts on True HDR displays instead
In your black-and-white world, I'm sure that things work that way.
In your world, you shouldn't complain about people taking pictures through your windows. You willingly radiate electromagnetic radiation - in the form of photons - so anything that can be seen through your windows is not private at all. Should have closed your curtains.
In your world, you shouldn't complain about people using parabolic microphones to listen to your conversations with another person in your household. You willingly make the surfaces vibrate, so anything that an outsider manages to pick up is not private at all. Should have use 2-foot thick reinforced concrete and lined the inside with sound absorbing padding.
In your world, you shouldn't complain if somebody goes through your trash and digs up everything from bills to medicine prescriptions. You willingly discarded it so callously, so it is not private at all. You should have incinerated it.
In your world, you shouldn't complain if private security companies band together and employ facial recognition among other to track your movements wherever their services have coverage, selling this data to yet other companies. After all, you willingly set foot outside. You should have gotten a teleworking job and gotten your groceries home-delivered.
Fortunately, in the real world, things aren't so black and white. Things are many shades of gray and probably all the colors of the rainbow, too. In the real world, we do define some rules, laws, that curtail these sorts of activities one way or another - generally in the interest of people's privacy.. even where in your world there would be none.
It is in that real world that Australia has seen fit to set privacy laws (Privacy Act) under which Google's activities are a no-no.
Whether or not those people should have known better, and should have secured their WiFi, or whether the people whose data has been collected even care that it occurred.. is a moot issue for the conclusion reached by the Australian privacy commissioner.
That person would see much the same as the patients with AMD. That is to say a loss of vision in the central region of your visual range (in the case of a non-AMD person: because the telescope is in the way, if nothing else), and all vision that -would- have fallen into the central region instead being expanded out toward the outer regions, essentially giving you a ring or donut shaped view of the world.
The article also mentions that if the person with AMD still has a good eye as well, that eye would be left untreated to provide for peripheral vision. That implies that with the device, peripheral vision would also be, to an extent, lost.
blatant as it may be, I read the article three times now - and Soilworker, you did well not to bother. I'm pretty sure the answer is not in there.
This doesn't seem to be about square pixels in terms of display technology (where hexagonal pixels may indeed be superior).
It also doesn't seem to be about picture acquisition.
On the face of it, it seems to be talking about mapping rudimentary shapes to pixels so that they conform to a most-likely contrast-matching scenario with regard to surrounding pixels. Which some other posters here already pointed out with posts about JPEG and the like - but it's not really comparable to that either. Not in technique and not in performance.
At best, as far as I can take away from it, it could be a different way to display an image when zoomed in / a technique that could be used when enlarging an image to provide greater apparent detail (although you wouldn't want to enlarge it - you'd want to store the masks found with the original image for display).
The results in the news blurb look pretty decent and if nothing else 'different' from other 'smart scaling' methods, so it's worth exploring. But what this has to do with square pixels as we're mostly familiar with them, I have no idea.
Now, about those hexagonal display pixels...
Well, that's an oft-heard complaint with any open source project, of course.. especially the free-as-in-beer ones; "You have the code, YOU make the changes if you think they're so important!" - completely ignoring that the user may not exactly be a programmer.
Even if you then say "enough of this" and pay somebody to make those changes for you (which your father could possibly do - perhaps get together with other people who also think it's a good idea and pool together the money), the odds of getting those changes included in the official distribution may be slim; meaning that for every update to the main version, the custom code may need review to make sure it still works when re-compiled. Before somebody suggests forking.. no, not everybody has the stamina to fork the project and eventually stage a coup or, by sheer popularity, have the main project integrate the changes after all. I rather suspect that parent poster's father wouldn't be interested in such a thing either.
On the other hand, I guess us end-users to have to keep in mind as well that the project's programmers aren't exactly on our payroll to do our bidding. Between my wishes for The GIMP and those of thousands of others, I'm pretty sure they have little incentive to focus specifically on mine when they already lay out active development plans.
This is really not that much different from closed source counterparts. If I ask Adobe to -please- let me just change the positioning of an image within a print page layout -despite- the fact that "center" is checked (and automatically unchecking that option if I indeed change that positioning)... the odds of Adobe making it so on a minor interim release are slim to none.
In your father's specific case, though.. did he happen to publish these pages online somewhere? If nothing else, he might find like-minded end-users who can, together, have more sway.
On a similar note.. time to link to this one again as the subdomain is back up (who knows for how long):
http://gui.gimp.org/index.php/Transformation_tool_specification
That depends on what they were doing.
Obviously one shouldn't expect to learn a different application through-and-through in just a day.
On the other hand.. if e.g. Google Docs did not use a bolded B button to turn text bold, like every other application going with that defacto standard, but instead went with a normally-written T - for Thick - which those in the graphics industry might instead think is to insert a text field, I could well-imagine that the learning curve would be much greater than it had to be.
As such, I'm far more interested in -exactly- what problems they faced, rather than the uninformative single-sentence conclusion, and hope that they plan on communicating these problems back to the developers, if not already done so.
I suppose that would make #7 - an application or driver sending a 'back' command directly to the browser (no idea if that's still DDE or somesuch).
Although it's also possible that the mouse driver simply fakes keystrokes (such as the Backspace key) when that button is pressed.. in which case, I'm not sure that would count as a different FireFox method so much as an input device method.
( my laptop has a little 4-way direction button that can be configured to have left = Back as well )
Is that in FireFox by default? It doesn't seem to do anything on this machine (Win/FF3.6.6).
I know I can add it by using e.g. http://www.mousegestures.org/ , but do add-ons count?
A sibling poster already mentioned the alt+left arrow.. I wonder how many ways there actually are...
1. Back button
2. Alt+Left Arrow
3. menubar: History - Back (and thus: Alt+s, B)
4. Right-click (context menu) on any blank area of a page - Back (and thus: Right-click, B)
5. Backspace button (maybe Win only?)
6. Shift+Mousewheel Down
Can't think of a 7+ right now.. any takers?
So, wait... how are the class members determined, then? How do they know where they should be sending these mails?
Now, for an iPhone 4, presuming it's activated, I suppose they -can- get the address information if they really wanted to as the address information is tied to it one way or another so that I can be properly billed for the plan (which is tied to the phone for now).
But let's say it's for some random laptop where address information is not required and not even asked. As far as I understand it - and please do correct me if I'm wrong - I -am- a member of the class. So how are they going to be mailing me?
Unless you're saying that you're -not- a member of the class *unless* you either A. get such a mailing or B. 'opt in' (join the class members).
That's what I liked about an old DOS game; instead of health bars and overall "either you're still healthy or you're dead" mentality, there was a small map in the bottom of the screen which showed exactly where you got hit. Hit in the leg? You didn't run so fast anymore. Hit in the arms? There goes your aim.
I wish I could recall the title.. I was going to write 'Cyclones' here, but a quick review of a youtube gameplay video tells me that wasn't it (Cyclones instead being the awesome title where aim and walking direction were semi-decoupled; also the same year SSI released Dark Legions.. ahh, memories).
Presumably the user will just jam the batteries in whichever way they please in their frustration and.. hey presto, it works.
I suppose a more serious side-effect would be that they might start thinking this holds true for -any- battery compartment, and subsequently kill their device.
I remember *some* devices that, instead of the cheap flat plate (positive contact) and spring (negative contact) configuration, had the housing built in such a manner that for the negative plate (which was semi-springy) it was full width, while for the positive plate it was shielded by the housing to just slightly over the width of the protruding positive contact of the AA/AAA battery.
That way, the battery could only be inserted one way. It solves the same big problem of inserting batteries the wrong way around and either the device not working, or worse.
It doesn't solve the "I wish I could put the battery either which way around so I don't have to use my square-peg-in-round-hole 18-month-old brain" problem, though - and it's still a fairly clever design. Now to see how well it holds up in mass production where tolerances of fitting such things in the housings are often seen as +-2mm and everything moves, twists and turns.
This is specifically for battery compartments with a physical parallel configuration, rather than a series configuration.
( 'physical configuration' as in the batteries laying side-by-side, rather than end-to-end, so the batteries' poles never directly touch eachother; unrelated to the electrical circuitry's configuration )
I'm trying to recall the last time I've seen a physical series configuration; but I just realized my old-ass flashlight counts as one.
( it's been replaced years ago by a proper wind-up for emergency cases and a decent Maglite-like one with a rechargable set for more frequent/high intensity beam use )
Yes, but everybody is part of the class -unless- they opt out. That means that if they just happen to never even hear about the class action for them to opt out.. guess what? tough luck.
There's a flaw in that argument, which becomes clear if you re-introduce the redundancy:
Whoops. Homosexual couples still can't -get- married in most states.. most notably California.
I do agree that Google's stance on heterosexual couples is oversimplifying the issue...
Although I do see many couples marrying, divorcing, re-marrying, divorcing, and so forth and so on, I still don't think that marriage - or rather, any union which comes with legal and corporate ramifications abound, should be treated so callously.
But the basic problem is that homosexuals cannot get married or signed into a union that is (federally) recognized and comes with the exact same benefits -and- obligations as a marriage between heterosexuals.
Fix that one, and the issue described in this article becomes moot.
The larger issue of whether or not two people living together and who get some benefits (the domestic partner health benefits) should, in fact, be similarly exempt from this tax, is a bit more difficult to figure out. Apparently those taxes are linked directly to those health benefits.. so one way not to pay them is by rejecting those health benefits. Something tells me that it'd be wiser to stick with the benefits and deal with the taxes. Question is.. why do those taxes magically disappear once you're married?
But then you're talking about a completely different field ( the 'field' I was referring to was -literally- a field.. with crops ) of use.
Similarly a photographer is going to want a display with a high resolution because although zooming is all good and well, it's going to be printed at a certain size - and it's at that size that the details are going to matter.. not that somebody can see a speck of dust when zoomed in 20x on the original digital back output.
There's certainly fields where it is *highly desirable*, just as it is -generally- desirable. But for the purpose stated, a higher density display is far from the suggested 'required', and a 320x240 display -is- sufficient for remote diagnosis if the picture you're sent is high enough in resolution (and taken in proper focus) to determine the best course of action. But if you're on-site, then (currently) nothing beats your eyes and being able to look at the plants directly / through a magnifying glass, and the pixel density of whatever phone you're carrying becomes moot.