Get ready, get out your checkbooks, soon you will be able to buy the Preview of the Extended Deluxe Director's Cut Extended Edition Preview. How many times will they try to sell you the same crap you already bought?
Think about it. The smart carts are designed to gather customer data even if you use cash. Now they can gather data on anyone using the cart, they're desperate to learn things like how much time people spend in which part of the store. Smart carts make that easy. They don't want to track the data back to you personally, they just want the data.
Yes, I know precisely what I'm saying. Profit margins on groceries range from around 1 to 3 percent. Stores are only profitable when they pull in secondary monies, like placement fees for special shelf space, or selling customer data. Yes, there is far more money made in the IT departments at major grocery chains than they make selling groceries.
This is all a huge scam. I worked with a major S. Cal grocery chain (that must go unnamed) during their early experiments in "smart carts." They have no interest whatsoever in improving your shopping experience with smart carts. Their sole motivation is to gather more customer data. Did you know that grocery chains make far more money selling customer data than they do selling groceries? The profit margin on groceries is very slim, but corporations will pay big bucks for consumer purchasing behavior records. They want huge databases of purchasing behavior so the can statistically analyze what other products customers are buying alongside their products.
You know, that sounds familiar. A few years back, I had a Photoshop plugin that did these sorts of effects, I particularly liked the pencil sketch effect that looked a lot like the A-HA video you mentioned. But I lost the plugin and I can't for the life of me remember who produced it. Oh well, it was cheap at about $50. I'd buy it again in a minute if I could figure out where to get it, and if it was updated for Photoshop CS.
No, there's nothing new about inkulator, and you obviously don't understand Maya's internals. Maya can easily use what's called "surface-normal reflectivity" to calculate a surface's brightness according to "leftness or bottomness" (or any other directional scheme you choose) before it renders with the vector shader that posterizes everything. Inkulator is a one-trick-pony, and it's an old trick that every good 3D guy knows.
"If Apple released Mac OS X to compete with Longhorn, would you switch?"
I think you have this backwards. MacOS X is out now, today, Longhorn is a long time off. You can't predict where the two OSes will be when Longhorn ships, nor can you predict where chip technology will be. It's looking like the G5 and successors will be kicking Intel/AMD's ass by the time Longhorn ships. You'll be upgrading your CPU before Longhorn ships, why not do a full upgrade and switch to MacOS X?
But the piezo ink droplets are propelled by an electrostatic field (think: Milliken Oil Drop Experiment). Oil droplets have an ionized surface so they can be easily propelled by an electrostatic field. But water droplets are neutrally charged and you need to ionize them to propel them in an electrostatic field. So they add salts to the inks, which as a side effect promotes oxidization of the pigments over the long term. That's how I understand the piezo technology, correct me if I'm wrong, they might have new technologies out there to get around the ionization problem, but I haven't heard of anything.
It really is dye because there isn't any binder. Think of oil paint, it's particles that are suspended in an oil binder with some solvent to keep it liquid. The solvent evaporates and the oil hardens and a thick layer of paint with high solids density is deposited. But the inkjet water based "pigments" don't have any binders, it's just the solvent (water) and the pigments. Without a binder to help you get a thick layer (relatively speaking, we're talking microscopic layers here). here isn't any way to get sufficient pigments down on the paper to get an archival print. When you have extremely light pigment application like pale colors, even slight fading is more noticeable than on the heavy solid colors..
I haven't found any really good sources of independent testing, I usually rely on regular art historical circles where archival testing is a whole different world. I think there should be more independent testing of inkjets, but none of the art conservationists really want to go near it, it's way below their standards. I think they'll look at it eventually, but the inks have a ways to go.
I personally use inkjets mostly to make negatives for contact printing in antiquated photo processes that are known to be archival (similar prints made 150 years ago are looking like new). I found some UV-opaque ink that did a wonderful job of making stencils or high contrast negatives for contact printing. But it clogged up my Epson's printheads. The UV ink system comes with clear solvent cleaning carts that you're supposed to print until the ink comes through clear, then put the UV ink cart in, print your negs, take the UV cart out and put the cleaning cart back in, print more until the UV is washed out and the ink is clear again, now put back the regular black ink cart and print until it's black again. What a pain in the ass. You really need to dedicate a printer to this ink, and print a lot of negs every day. I let my inkjet sit for a week with the UV ink carts left in, and the nozzles clogged solid.
Yes, I completely reject the Wilhelm Research tests. They are fundamentally flawed. For example, Wilhelm released a 100+ year rating for an earlier Epson "archival" inkset that turned out to fade significantly after only about 30 days, Epson withdrew it and reformulated their inks almost immediately.
Archival inks aren't useless, they just aren't archival. They'll generally last a bit longer than nonarchival inks, but they aren't archival in any sense of the word used by art curators.
The most fundamental problem is that all current inkjet technologies require that the inks conduct electricity, they just add some salts to the liquid (if you recall your basic physics classes, water doesn't conduct electricity but if you add salt, it does conduct). Salt promotes oxidization, the main enemy of pigment stability.
These effects cannot accurately be predicted in accelerated aging tests that Wilhelm performs. There are many other chemical problems with inkjet ink (or more properly, dye) and the methods used to test archivality, but I don't have time to get into it right now. I'll just give you a quickie.. Wilhelm's ratings are for estimated display life under a specific lighting intensity. That intensity is far lower than any lighting found in normal usage, it's not even bright enough to SEE the print clearly. So the 150 year ratings are not for a print hanging in your sunny living room, it's 150 years for a print hanging in your closet with a 10 watt light bulb lit about once a day for 10 minutes. Light promotes oxidization of the inks, keep the prints in total darkness and you'll extend their life, but they'll still fade.
Furthermore, Wilhelm is solely funded by the ink manufacturers, if he doesn't give favorable ratings, his funding will be in jeopardy. Claims of archival qualities always come from people with a financial incentive to overrate the archival qualities. It's a scam.
Sorry, your Ultrachrome inks aren't going to last 150 years, no matter what you do. If you're spending big bucks on expensive "archival" inks, you're wasting your money. I have spent years trying to tell people that there is no such thing as archival inkjet prints. It is technologically impossible with all current inkjet technologies. But that is a long story, full of technical details that are irrelevant to the original question. If you want archival prints, you'll have to output your digital images to a film recorder and have the transparencies printed at a color film lab that specializes in archival fine-art printing.
Your question is too vague. What are your requirements? Do you do high volume printing? Or just a few HQ prints every few weeks?
This really makes a difference. Back in the 80s, before inkjets were common, I used to operate an Iris inkjet 3072, it made 11x17 prints with a cost of paper and ink of about 20 cents, IIRC (we charged $75 per print). Quart bottles of ink cost less than modern inkjet carts, each CMYK color was fed from a bottle, I only changed bottles about once a week, and the printer ran full time about 16 hours a day. BUT the printer cost $80k and the annual service contract was something around $8k. And you had to buy the service contract because the print heads (nozzles actually) died often, they required continual cleaning and replacement, it was a very high maintenance beast. The point of this anecdote is you can get really REALLY cheap-per-print consumables (ink) but it isn't practical unless you're doing incredibly high volume or you need extremely high quality prints. You've merely shifted the cost from consumables to hardware maintenance.
So get us some more data on your requirements, and we'll be better able to make a recommendation. You could buy an Iris, or a cheapo disposable Lexmark, it all depends on what kind of printing you do.
In case you'd like to really read K-B's paper of his methods, you can find it here [pnas.org]. Using the same methods he used to predict the Japan and San Simeon quakes, he was able to backtrack and use data to show that his method could have predicted five other earthquakes. There really is nothing phony about this and it's simply good science to test your results against a "control."
Yes, I read that paper. It's pseudoscience dressed up as science. It is the classic fallacy of data analysis, let me explain via analogy.
Let's say someone gets the crackpot idea that they can mathematically predict the Dow stock market index. All you need to do is write a mathematical function that matches the graph. You just get the existing data and do a little analysis, maybe a litte FFT to determine which function will match the curve to date. Then you have the magic predictive function that will show you the future path of the curve. But alas, as the stock traders always say, past performance is no indication of future performance. There are an infinite number of functions that will track the past data accurately, only one out of that infinite number of functions will accurately predict future performance. The most subtle errors occur when people think they've found the magic function, it closely matches future performance as we watch the data come in. But it's never an exact match. Sooner or later we discover the magic function is wrong, and we begin another fruitless search for the correct one, the odds are stacked against us by infinity-to-one.
One of the big tipoffs of the unscientific nature of his method is that you can run your function against past data and say "I WOULD have accurately predicted this past quake if I had run the analysis back in the past." Well of COURSE it would have worked, that's inherent in the statistical analysis, he developed the model by analyzing data from those quakes. This is a key indicator of statistical fraud.
Now of course, there is a possibility that K-B might be a genius that found the one true function that underlies the physics of earthquakes. But it is infinitely improbable. He's already been proven wrong. It just isn't possible to use Newtonian Mechanics and mathematically model the dynamics of every atom in the Earth, all the tidal and gravitational forces that affect the earth etc, that all add up to earthquake probability.
BTW, newspaper articles indicate that UCLA and K-B were investigated by the California Board of Geologists and Geophysicsts for practicing Geophysics without a license. If you run into him sometime, ask him how that turned out.
Wrong. I live in Tornado Alley and I've survived 2 tornados, everyone around here LIVES for tornado warnings. Let me clue you in.
Tornados cannot be predicted. It can be DETECTED when conditions are right for tornado formation, that's called a Tornado Watch. There are about 50x more Tornado Watches than Tornados. Lately meteorologists have begun issuing Tornado Warnings based on your "predictions before they form," it's called a Radar-Indicated Tornado. It isn't very accurate. There are about 10x more Tornado Warnings than real tornados. Meteorologists cannot look at a "forming" tornado storm and predict a tornado with anything more than about 10% accuracy. That isn't science, it's fortunetelling.
I've been watching that lunatic Keilis-Borok for quite some time and you have not described his activities accurately. K-B never claimed to have accurately predicted more than the 2 quakes in Japan and San Simeon. He made a well-publicised recent prediction that there would be a 6.5 quake at a specific spot near the Mohave Desert. He was wrong, no quake occurred, the prediction has expired for months and still not even a minor quake in the predicted zone. The Mohave prediction was claimed to be the 3rd in a series of predictions from the same models, hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
I read K-B's papers and analyzed his theories and they are complete horseshit, unscientific garbage. I am not a seismologist, but I used to work as a data analyst with professional seismologists, so I know what I'm talking about. K-B is a nut. He's like the guy in the movie "Pi" that thinks he's found the secret equation that can predict the stock market.
I have a rather expensive MontBlanc passport case, it's a slightly oversized bifold just large enough to hold a US passport. I splurged when I was going overseas for a trip and wanted to keep all my documents together. It's just big enough to fit your passport plus a small notebook, plus about 10 credit cards, some business cards, and money. It's nice having the oversize wallet when you're dealing with other currency that is larger than US greenbacks, or pocket documents like the Tokyo Metro map (they just fit).
The Bush administration is the most secretive government in American history, retroactively classifying public data, holding secret meetings to decide public policy, and refusing to hold regular press conferences.
Mr. Candidate, will you acknowledge the public's right to participatory government and oversight, and open the process of government to public inspection? Will you commit to monthly press conferences, truly OPEN press conferences where the questions are not picked in advance?
There is very little you can tell a 10 year old that will have any relevance to the IT careers that will exist when they are 20 years old. In fact, the lead time for a 100% turnover in technology is more like 5 years.
This reminds me of when I was in high school and a recruiter from MIT came by. He gave a long lecture on this very subject. He was retired, and said he knew almost nothing about modern technology, but he did have some particularly relevant advice.
He said that the technologies that you will work on in your post-college life, the technology that will be your career path, will not even exist when you are in high school, so that anything you learned would be completely obsolete.. with ONE exception: math. Math is never obsolete, and is the fundamental basis of every technology sector. He gave his own example, he finished high school just as WWII broke out, but when he went to MIT, he worked on developing Radar, which did not even exist a when he was in high school. He spent the rest of his career working on Radar systems.
I wasn't too sure if this was a realistic assessment of my future. A few months later (IIRC this was around ~1973) I visited MIT in person, for admissions interviews and to check out the campus. One of my hosts said I should come to his Comp Sci lecture to see something really important. The lecture was about the brand new Intel 8008 chip, the first time the chip had been shown on the MIT campus. I didn't realize the significance of what I was seeing until several years later when I built my own 8080 microcomputer.
So yes indeed, the microprocessor technology I would work on for my entire career was invented just as I was graduating from high school.
Moral of the story: study math. Forget the IT lecture, it will bore the kids and it will be obsolete before they even ENTER high school. Focus on the everchanging nature technology, that it will always be new tech, newer and more exciting than anything they can even imagine, and math will always be the key. Maybe you can use some elements of this story. Talk about what computers were like 10 years ago, and how things changed beyond even YOUR expectations in the last 10 years, and ask them to guess what it will be like in 10 years. Get them to use their imagination, get them excited about the future.
Re:Faithful reproduction? Hardly.
on
Mechanical Pong
·
· Score: 1
That's interesting, I didn't notice that. Of course, the true Pong behavior has the ball waiting a brief interval and then entering the playing field at a random spot. The "serve" has to be a bit more challenging and random to make the game interesting.
The video says the paddle only has 3 zones, the center bounces flat, the two sides bounce at an angle. The real Pong game has the paddle broken into about 8 zones, each zone bounces the ball at an increasing angle depending on how far it is from the center. If you see the video, you might also notice they manage to return the ball even when it is way beyond the side of the paddle, which really should be a complete miss.
Canon cameras have them, my PowerShot S50 has the feature, but it's discontinued, I think the equivalent new model is the PowerShot S60. Most pro level cameras have an intervalometer, but I cringe at the thought of raising an expensive pro camera up on a kite or baloon.
Most digital cameras have an intervalometer, you can set it to take a picture at fixed intervals, i.e. one pic every 30 seconds. Just start the intervalometer, run the camera up in the baloon/kite. Of course you'll waste a couple of shots while the camera is being raised and lowered, who cares?
Another study involved airliners -- and the conclusion was, if you're flying, you're going to be breathing recirculated air that has a strong risk of someone's wandering TB germs floating in it -- and that if you saw anyone coughing, you should consider yourself exposed.
Yep, there was a case like that near here in the Midwest. Some idiot Maharishi cultist flew back from India through O'Hare, she landed in the US and keeled over from TB. The hospital asked the airline to track down every single person on each leg of her flight, IIRC a dozen of them tested positive for TB. IMHO the airline did a good job helping with the containment.
Slashdot Mirror
Get ready, get out your checkbooks, soon you will be able to buy the Preview of the Extended Deluxe Director's Cut Extended Edition Preview. How many times will they try to sell you the same crap you already bought?
Think about it. The smart carts are designed to gather customer data even if you use cash. Now they can gather data on anyone using the cart, they're desperate to learn things like how much time people spend in which part of the store. Smart carts make that easy. They don't want to track the data back to you personally, they just want the data.
Yes, I know precisely what I'm saying. Profit margins on groceries range from around 1 to 3 percent. Stores are only profitable when they pull in secondary monies, like placement fees for special shelf space, or selling customer data. Yes, there is far more money made in the IT departments at major grocery chains than they make selling groceries.
This is all a huge scam. I worked with a major S. Cal grocery chain (that must go unnamed) during their early experiments in "smart carts." They have no interest whatsoever in improving your shopping experience with smart carts. Their sole motivation is to gather more customer data. Did you know that grocery chains make far more money selling customer data than they do selling groceries? The profit margin on groceries is very slim, but corporations will pay big bucks for consumer purchasing behavior records. They want huge databases of purchasing behavior so the can statistically analyze what other products customers are buying alongside their products.
There's only one flaw in your reasoning: Inkulator is a WINDOWS app.
You know, that sounds familiar. A few years back, I had a Photoshop plugin that did these sorts of effects, I particularly liked the pencil sketch effect that looked a lot like the A-HA video you mentioned. But I lost the plugin and I can't for the life of me remember who produced it. Oh well, it was cheap at about $50. I'd buy it again in a minute if I could figure out where to get it, and if it was updated for Photoshop CS.
No, there's nothing new about inkulator, and you obviously don't understand Maya's internals. Maya can easily use what's called "surface-normal reflectivity" to calculate a surface's brightness according to "leftness or bottomness" (or any other directional scheme you choose) before it renders with the vector shader that posterizes everything. Inkulator is a one-trick-pony, and it's an old trick that every good 3D guy knows.
I think you have this backwards. MacOS X is out now, today, Longhorn is a long time off. You can't predict where the two OSes will be when Longhorn ships, nor can you predict where chip technology will be. It's looking like the G5 and successors will be kicking Intel/AMD's ass by the time Longhorn ships. You'll be upgrading your CPU before Longhorn ships, why not do a full upgrade and switch to MacOS X?
But the piezo ink droplets are propelled by an electrostatic field (think: Milliken Oil Drop Experiment). Oil droplets have an ionized surface so they can be easily propelled by an electrostatic field. But water droplets are neutrally charged and you need to ionize them to propel them in an electrostatic field. So they add salts to the inks, which as a side effect promotes oxidization of the pigments over the long term. That's how I understand the piezo technology, correct me if I'm wrong, they might have new technologies out there to get around the ionization problem, but I haven't heard of anything.
It really is dye because there isn't any binder. Think of oil paint, it's particles that are suspended in an oil binder with some solvent to keep it liquid. The solvent evaporates and the oil hardens and a thick layer of paint with high solids density is deposited. But the inkjet water based "pigments" don't have any binders, it's just the solvent (water) and the pigments. Without a binder to help you get a thick layer (relatively speaking, we're talking microscopic layers here). here isn't any way to get sufficient pigments down on the paper to get an archival print. When you have extremely light pigment application like pale colors, even slight fading is more noticeable than on the heavy solid colors..
I haven't found any really good sources of independent testing, I usually rely on regular art historical circles where archival testing is a whole different world. I think there should be more independent testing of inkjets, but none of the art conservationists really want to go near it, it's way below their standards. I think they'll look at it eventually, but the inks have a ways to go.
I personally use inkjets mostly to make negatives for contact printing in antiquated photo processes that are known to be archival (similar prints made 150 years ago are looking like new). I found some UV-opaque ink that did a wonderful job of making stencils or high contrast negatives for contact printing. But it clogged up my Epson's printheads. The UV ink system comes with clear solvent cleaning carts that you're supposed to print until the ink comes through clear, then put the UV ink cart in, print your negs, take the UV cart out and put the cleaning cart back in, print more until the UV is washed out and the ink is clear again, now put back the regular black ink cart and print until it's black again. What a pain in the ass. You really need to dedicate a printer to this ink, and print a lot of negs every day. I let my inkjet sit for a week with the UV ink carts left in, and the nozzles clogged solid.
well ok, since you asked...
Yes, I completely reject the Wilhelm Research tests. They are fundamentally flawed. For example, Wilhelm released a 100+ year rating for an earlier Epson "archival" inkset that turned out to fade significantly after only about 30 days, Epson withdrew it and reformulated their inks almost immediately.
Archival inks aren't useless, they just aren't archival. They'll generally last a bit longer than nonarchival inks, but they aren't archival in any sense of the word used by art curators.
The most fundamental problem is that all current inkjet technologies require that the inks conduct electricity, they just add some salts to the liquid (if you recall your basic physics classes, water doesn't conduct electricity but if you add salt, it does conduct). Salt promotes oxidization, the main enemy of pigment stability.
These effects cannot accurately be predicted in accelerated aging tests that Wilhelm performs. There are many other chemical problems with inkjet ink (or more properly, dye) and the methods used to test archivality, but I don't have time to get into it right now. I'll just give you a quickie.. Wilhelm's ratings are for estimated display life under a specific lighting intensity. That intensity is far lower than any lighting found in normal usage, it's not even bright enough to SEE the print clearly. So the 150 year ratings are not for a print hanging in your sunny living room, it's 150 years for a print hanging in your closet with a 10 watt light bulb lit about once a day for 10 minutes. Light promotes oxidization of the inks, keep the prints in total darkness and you'll extend their life, but they'll still fade.
Furthermore, Wilhelm is solely funded by the ink manufacturers, if he doesn't give favorable ratings, his funding will be in jeopardy. Claims of archival qualities always come from people with a financial incentive to overrate the archival qualities. It's a scam.
Sorry, your Ultrachrome inks aren't going to last 150 years, no matter what you do. If you're spending big bucks on expensive "archival" inks, you're wasting your money.
I have spent years trying to tell people that there is no such thing as archival inkjet prints. It is technologically impossible with all current inkjet technologies. But that is a long story, full of technical details that are irrelevant to the original question.
If you want archival prints, you'll have to output your digital images to a film recorder and have the transparencies printed at a color film lab that specializes in archival fine-art printing.
Your question is too vague. What are your requirements? Do you do high volume printing? Or just a few HQ prints every few weeks?
This really makes a difference. Back in the 80s, before inkjets were common, I used to operate an Iris inkjet 3072, it made 11x17 prints with a cost of paper and ink of about 20 cents, IIRC (we charged $75 per print). Quart bottles of ink cost less than modern inkjet carts, each CMYK color was fed from a bottle, I only changed bottles about once a week, and the printer ran full time about 16 hours a day. BUT the printer cost $80k and the annual service contract was something around $8k. And you had to buy the service contract because the print heads (nozzles actually) died often, they required continual cleaning and replacement, it was a very high maintenance beast.
The point of this anecdote is you can get really REALLY cheap-per-print consumables (ink) but it isn't practical unless you're doing incredibly high volume or you need extremely high quality prints. You've merely shifted the cost from consumables to hardware maintenance.
So get us some more data on your requirements, and we'll be better able to make a recommendation. You could buy an Iris, or a cheapo disposable Lexmark, it all depends on what kind of printing you do.
Yes, I read that paper. It's pseudoscience dressed up as science. It is the classic fallacy of data analysis, let me explain via analogy.
Let's say someone gets the crackpot idea that they can mathematically predict the Dow stock market index. All you need to do is write a mathematical function that matches the graph. You just get the existing data and do a little analysis, maybe a litte FFT to determine which function will match the curve to date. Then you have the magic predictive function that will show you the future path of the curve.
But alas, as the stock traders always say, past performance is no indication of future performance. There are an infinite number of functions that will track the past data accurately, only one out of that infinite number of functions will accurately predict future performance. The most subtle errors occur when people think they've found the magic function, it closely matches future performance as we watch the data come in. But it's never an exact match. Sooner or later we discover the magic function is wrong, and we begin another fruitless search for the correct one, the odds are stacked against us by infinity-to-one.
One of the big tipoffs of the unscientific nature of his method is that you can run your function against past data and say "I WOULD have accurately predicted this past quake if I had run the analysis back in the past." Well of COURSE it would have worked, that's inherent in the statistical analysis, he developed the model by analyzing data from those quakes. This is a key indicator of statistical fraud.
Now of course, there is a possibility that K-B might be a genius that found the one true function that underlies the physics of earthquakes. But it is infinitely improbable. He's already been proven wrong. It just isn't possible to use Newtonian Mechanics and mathematically model the dynamics of every atom in the Earth, all the tidal and gravitational forces that affect the earth etc, that all add up to earthquake probability.
BTW, newspaper articles indicate that UCLA and K-B were investigated by the California Board of Geologists and Geophysicsts for practicing Geophysics without a license. If you run into him sometime, ask him how that turned out.
Wrong. I live in Tornado Alley and I've survived 2 tornados, everyone around here LIVES for tornado warnings. Let me clue you in.
Tornados cannot be predicted. It can be DETECTED when conditions are right for tornado formation, that's called a Tornado Watch. There are about 50x more Tornado Watches than Tornados.
Lately meteorologists have begun issuing Tornado Warnings based on your "predictions before they form," it's called a Radar-Indicated Tornado. It isn't very accurate. There are about 10x more Tornado Warnings than real tornados.
Meteorologists cannot look at a "forming" tornado storm and predict a tornado with anything more than about 10% accuracy. That isn't science, it's fortunetelling.
I've been watching that lunatic Keilis-Borok for quite some time and you have not described his activities accurately. K-B never claimed to have accurately predicted more than the 2 quakes in Japan and San Simeon. He made a well-publicised recent prediction that there would be a 6.5 quake at a specific spot near the Mohave Desert. He was wrong, no quake occurred, the prediction has expired for months and still not even a minor quake in the predicted zone. The Mohave prediction was claimed to be the 3rd in a series of predictions from the same models, hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
I read K-B's papers and analyzed his theories and they are complete horseshit, unscientific garbage. I am not a seismologist, but I used to work as a data analyst with professional seismologists, so I know what I'm talking about. K-B is a nut. He's like the guy in the movie "Pi" that thinks he's found the secret equation that can predict the stock market.
No, it is impossible to predict tornados. It IS possible to DETECT tornados as quickly as they form.
I have a rather expensive MontBlanc passport case, it's a slightly oversized bifold just large enough to hold a US passport. I splurged when I was going overseas for a trip and wanted to keep all my documents together. It's just big enough to fit your passport plus a small notebook, plus about 10 credit cards, some business cards, and money. It's nice having the oversize wallet when you're dealing with other currency that is larger than US greenbacks, or pocket documents like the Tokyo Metro map (they just fit).
This is a question for both candidates:
The Bush administration is the most secretive government in American history, retroactively classifying public data, holding secret meetings to decide public policy, and refusing to hold regular press conferences.
Mr. Candidate, will you acknowledge the public's right to participatory government and oversight, and open the process of government to public inspection? Will you commit to monthly press conferences, truly OPEN press conferences where the questions are not picked in advance?
There is very little you can tell a 10 year old that will have any relevance to the IT careers that will exist when they are 20 years old. In fact, the lead time for a 100% turnover in technology is more like 5 years.
This reminds me of when I was in high school and a recruiter from MIT came by. He gave a long lecture on this very subject. He was retired, and said he knew almost nothing about modern technology, but he did have some particularly relevant advice.
He said that the technologies that you will work on in your post-college life, the technology that will be your career path, will not even exist when you are in high school, so that anything you learned would be completely obsolete.. with ONE exception: math. Math is never obsolete, and is the fundamental basis of every technology sector. He gave his own example, he finished high school just as WWII broke out, but when he went to MIT, he worked on developing Radar, which did not even exist a when he was in high school. He spent the rest of his career working on Radar systems.
I wasn't too sure if this was a realistic assessment of my future. A few months later (IIRC this was around ~1973) I visited MIT in person, for admissions interviews and to check out the campus. One of my hosts said I should come to his Comp Sci lecture to see something really important. The lecture was about the brand new Intel 8008 chip, the first time the chip had been shown on the MIT campus. I didn't realize the significance of what I was seeing until several years later when I built my own 8080 microcomputer.
So yes indeed, the microprocessor technology I would work on for my entire career was invented just as I was graduating from high school.
Moral of the story: study math. Forget the IT lecture, it will bore the kids and it will be obsolete before they even ENTER high school. Focus on the everchanging nature technology, that it will always be new tech, newer and more exciting than anything they can even imagine, and math will always be the key. Maybe you can use some elements of this story. Talk about what computers were like 10 years ago, and how things changed beyond even YOUR expectations in the last 10 years, and ask them to guess what it will be like in 10 years. Get them to use their imagination, get them excited about the future.
That's interesting, I didn't notice that. Of course, the true Pong behavior has the ball waiting a brief interval and then entering the playing field at a random spot. The "serve" has to be a bit more challenging and random to make the game interesting.
The video says the paddle only has 3 zones, the center bounces flat, the two sides bounce at an angle. The real Pong game has the paddle broken into about 8 zones, each zone bounces the ball at an increasing angle depending on how far it is from the center.
If you see the video, you might also notice they manage to return the ball even when it is way beyond the side of the paddle, which really should be a complete miss.
Canon cameras have them, my PowerShot S50 has the feature, but it's discontinued, I think the equivalent new model is the PowerShot S60. Most pro level cameras have an intervalometer, but I cringe at the thought of raising an expensive pro camera up on a kite or baloon.
Most digital cameras have an intervalometer, you can set it to take a picture at fixed intervals, i.e. one pic every 30 seconds. Just start the intervalometer, run the camera up in the baloon/kite. Of course you'll waste a couple of shots while the camera is being raised and lowered, who cares?
Yep, there was a case like that near here in the Midwest. Some idiot Maharishi cultist flew back from India through O'Hare, she landed in the US and keeled over from TB. The hospital asked the airline to track down every single person on each leg of her flight, IIRC a dozen of them tested positive for TB. IMHO the airline did a good job helping with the containment.