1) If the detainee is told that he is being monitored than he will say nothing to incriminate himself, thus defeating the purpose of monitoring.
1A) But the detainee will also not be able to communicate effectively with his coconspiritors on the outside. Maybe you don't find out as much about the crimes he and his friends are planning but at least you disrupt his ability to commit them.
1B) It's not even true. Many prisoners already have their phone calls (other than to their lawyer) monitored WITH their knowledge and STILL slip up during the flow of conversation.
2) This cant be strictly legal, any information garnered in this way may be challenged and thrown out, again defeating the purpose.
2A) I don't think the law is as clear as you think on this matter.
2B) You may be right though about the legal issue, but the FBI has two tasks which in this case potentially conflict. Their traditional law enforcement task is to bring the guilty to justice which means they have to follow all the niceties of protecting the accused's civil liberties or lose their case because of the exclusionary rule. The other task is to act as a domestic intelligence (or counterintelligence) agency which involves gathering intelligence (in this case to prevent future attacks) regardless of whether or not that intelligence is gathered in a way that will be admissable in court. (sort of like MI6 in the UK which is NOT a law enforcement agency and so has no defacto restrictions on it's methods but also no dejure authority - thus their number one rule is: Thou shalt not get caught) After 9/11 the FBI had a new mandate to put more emphasis on the intelligence gathering rather than only on law enforcement.
3) Assuming the Govt. has arrested over 1000 people so far, and that rate of arrest continues, how many man hours are going to be used up carrying this out. Hours which could be better used in other ways assuming that monitoring will achieve nothing.
Do you have a better way for them to spend their time? Honestly if you know of any more promising leads I would hope that you have already informed the FBI about them. A lot of investigative work is following up every lead or *possiblity of developing a lead* no matter how unpromising it may be. Monitoring the conversations of people you are already suspicious enough to detain is a pretty promising source of future leads.
4) If this does go ahead, how long will it be before its extended out to other cases.
A fair concern but then again the "slippery slope" argument could as easily by used to prevent ANY action by police. "If they put murderers in jail it's only a matter of time before they put jaywalkers in jail! We must protest to stop the jailing of murderers"
5) And if there is no lawyer/client privledge than how can lawyers give clients the best defence possible, which even guilty people deserve, never mind those that have been wrongly accused.
5A) From what I understand this only applies to phone conversations so their right to have confidential conversations with their lawyers is not being denied only the privilege of having private phone conversations which does not seem that unreasonable a restriction considering the number of organised crime figures that manage to run criminal enterprises from jail.
5B) Just a niggling point - the guilty DO NOT deserve the best defence possible. They only thing they deserve is to be punished for their crimes. They have a RIGHT to the best defense possible because we don't know whether they are the guilty or the wrongfully accused. If we KNEW they were guilty we would not need the whole complication of the judicial process.
Frankly, the government should rethink its policy and seek reimbursement from thrillseekers.
Um, these particular thrillseekers ARE the government (UK government that is). From their website: "QinetiQ comprises the greater part of DERA, the British Government's 'Defence Evaluation and Research Agency'" While many posts about this story seem to think that this is a couple of guys puttering about their garage looking to get an honorable mention in the Darwin Awards they are in fact doing military research. For a quick explanation on why a modern military might be interested in balloons check out this Scientific American article on modern "observations ballons" or "Aerostat Radar System" as the U.S. military calls it.
Already have it Well, something like that at least. I also remember seeing something about a Navy project looking into using balloons to replace the E2C (you know those little mini-awacs they fly from carriers) Seems like a crazy idea since I doubt you would want a tethered balloon if you ran into rough weather and an untethered balloon would just float around on the wind (what little there is at that altitude) not going where you want it to go.
A lot of people have made comments similar comments but at the risk of being modded down -1 Redundant I just have to rant.
I haven't been following the convoluted politics of adding new tld's but the end result seems just spectacularly stupid. There is definitely a need for change but the new domains don't seem like they are going to help much at all. They are too generic which was fine for.com when the web was new but is part of the problem now that it has grown so large. If.biz or.info have any success businesses are just going to register their name under all TLD's to avoid potential confusion. Ford Motor Co. is not going to let a site about the artist Henry Chapman Ford, the The Ford Diner or the Ford Law firm get the domain ford.biz. It seems the logical solution would have been to create more specific TLD's (ford.law, ford.art) and even more importantly make easier and encourage the use of existing geographic TLD's (i.e. ford.ma.us) for local brick and morter businesses who would find a TLD indicating their physical location a distinct advantage. The only new TLD that seems that it *might* help is.name which could get personal and family domains out of the.com TLD and would also provide those sites protection from companies suing them for the use of their own family name.
...instead of mothballing everything because NASA was originally created for military and defence issues ithas been able to adapt to become a huge foundation for scientific research
Yes, that is true but since scientific research is not a fundamental purpose of government or an urgent need NASA's budget has been and will continue to suffer.
The problem is that funding fundamental reseach that does not have direct economic gain, whether through products or important patents, runs into the prisoners dilema. By having a government that forces us to pay for things that are benifitial for all of society, ie schools, infrastructure, fundamental reseach, so they actually move forward.
A much better argument than the one I was responding to - remember I said there *were* arguments for government involvement but that individual decision making and freedom where not among them. I am not against government funding for scientific research but I recognise that it is a secondary priority for government. When it is funded it has for the most part been tied to governments primary goals (usually national defense) just as tightly as privately funded research has been tied to the primary goals of those funding it (profits). Research that does not serve the primary goals of those funding it is done on the margins in either case (admittedly the 'margins' of government are wider)
To be fair to the idea of privatising NASA alot of the really expensive stuff they are doing is NOT primary scientific research but the (now) more prosaic (and potentially profitable) work of moving stuff into orbit. It will not matter to a research satellite that it was put into orbit by a government owned and operated rocket or by a private for-profit company. Also by your reasoning UMASS is a better research university than MIT because it is a public university and MIT is a private university. You may point out that much of the research at MIT is funded by government but that would likely be the case at a privatised NASA as well.
Sure some of these programs are not getting the desired results, but imagine the social retardation if public schools relied on private sector money with strings attached, like forcing advertisements in class.
We don't need to imagine a hypothetical scenario here. We already have many private schools most of which are not known to produce "social retardation" whereas that does seem to be the normal product of certain public schools.
It is interesting that when most powerful societies start to crumble it begins with an usurping of power and quickly followed with not funding scientific research, espeically NON-PROFITABLE research.
Can you give me some concrete examples? I can see the usurping part though I think you would find as many examples in history of usurpation preceding a rise to power as well (one thinks of Julius Ceaser crossing the Rubicon) but I'm not as sure you could make a case that ending the funding of non-profitable scientific research was the cause of a societies decline as opposed to a symptom of it.
If you are right though I suppose we should be glad Gore's attempt to steal the election failed;-)
I think the leaders of the country have really missed the point of the space program... We'd rather fight some pointless war in Afghanistan that we won't win, and I bet that costs a pretty penny.
I think you have really missed the point of government or at least the stated "point" of the US government. Check the beginning of the U.S. Declaration of Independance and the Preamble to the Constitution for the governments stated purpose. Scientific advancement doesn't make the list but protecting citizens right to life, "providing a common defense" and "ensuring domestic tranquility" are prominently mentioned. Science is a "one off" activity at best.
As for the war being pointless: Even if scientific advancement is a higher priority than "providing a common defense" of our lives and "domestic tranquility" (if I understand your priorities) impoverished, insecure or dead people are generally not very good at advancing science so if only as a practical matter to protect the space program we should probably try to defend our citizens from being killed and our society from massive disruptions by al Queada. It seems to me we have three options for an overall strategy.
1) An offensive strategy - We destroy al Queada. Since they are taking refuge with their allies in Afghanistan this entails a war in Afghanistan.
2) A defensive strategy - We could leave al Queada alone but build an impregnable defense. At a minimum this would probably require closing our borders, at least to arabs and muslims. Since it is only a matter of time before they develop or steal nukes we would have to restrict access to our ports,international air travel etc. and move anything we don't want nuked away from our borders with Mexico and Canada. We would also want SDI in case they use a more conventional nuclear delivery method.
3) Surrender: We could seek to appease them. This is not a sure fire strategy (just ask Neville Chamberlain) It would be particularly difficult since al Queada has not even claimed responsiblity let alone made any specific demands. Also this is unlikely to work in the short run since even if we complied with (what we imagine are) their demands I doubt we could do so quickly enough to stop existing attacks that are planned. At an absolute minimum this would require pulling all our troops out of any muslim land, ending aid to Isreal, Bosnia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Phillipenes and India (for the sake of Kashmeer) and standing by as those nations adopted an Islamic "Republic" government essentially identical to the Taliban. It would probably also include a rather large sum of "danegeld". It may also entail ceding Spain to Morroco since bin Laden has decried the "tragedy of Andalusia" as fervently as the tragedy of Palestine. At worst it may entail adopting Islamic government ourselves though that would probably be a long time out.
A sane strategy should probably involve some aspect of all three. Having an immigration and visa program which is more security focussed and pursuing foreign policies that don't alienate a large segment of the world's population are both important. Destroying a professed enemy with the capablity and inclination to attack and kill you is an absolute necessity.
The fact that the private sector invariably gives rise to the worst possible situation for the consumer...
You are so right. Just the other day after 1.5 hours in the line at the DMV I was pondering "Why can't a trip to the grocery store be as simple as this?"
How did it ever get to the point where one of our greatest and proudest institutions needs to privitize one of their greatest resources in order to keep going?
We no longer have the same urgent need for a space program that we had when we first developed it. NASA was never *just* about idle scientific curiosity. It was about developing the technologies needed for national defense and showing that technical superiority off to the rest of the world, for the sake of national prestige and it's accompanying international influence. When the Russians sent up Sputnik we were not shocked and dismayed because we thought that they might find out interesting facts about quasars before us but because they demonstrated the technical ability required to make *other* things like ICBM's, spy & communications satellites etc. We went to the moon to prove to ourselves and the world that we were capable of even more than the Russians - scientific exploration was a nice justification and byproduct. Today we have proven our technological, economic and military superiority, NASA no longer has those other more urgent (and more fundamentally related to the actual purpose of government) tasks and is left with the scientific exploration pretext and beaurocratic inertia.
No other country in the world comes close to the US in terms of economic might, and yet it is near-third-world nations like China that are now expanding their space programs as we are selling off ours
China is expanding their space program for the same reasons we no longer have. They are developing the technology to build ICBM's. Prior to the leaks of technology from western firms for the sake of the Chinese space program they did not have missles capable of hitting the continental USA - now they do. They are also concerned with proving their national greatness to placate their own populace and to increase their international influence. And finally as a very nice side bonus (and their pretext) they are acting as a private company would and seeking to make a profit. India wants to do the same things - particularly because of their rivalry with China.
No, this is just another symptom of the long, slow decline of the US into a narcissistic corporate paradise as the rest of the world forges on ahead of us into the future.
If the corporations can find a way to make a buck off of space we will far surpass the rest of the world in forging ahead into the future.
It seems the only people here with any kind of enthusiasm are the ones that want to control your lives...
In general it is government that *controls* your life - just think about what the word "government" means. In this example I as an individual may not WANT to support the space program but I am forced to by the government under the threat of fines, imprisonment and if I resist the ultimate force of government is the policemans gun. If I don't want to buy a Wintel computer I may forgoe using some computer programs and have occasional compatibility problems transfering files to other computers but Bill Gates can't put me in jail.
...everyone would rather let them get on with and have removed the intolerable burden of decision making.
Again, you have it 180 degrees backwards. The private sector is generally a realm of many choices and lots of decisions. Government usually does not give you much choice. In the private sector I have a decision whether or not to support a non-profit scientific organization seeking to land on the moon. There may be many such non-profits to choose from or there may be any number of similar commercial projects whose products (space tours, astroid mined minerals, whatever) I have the decision to buy or not. If government decides to support such I project my only decision is whether I'm willing to go to jail to NOT support the project.
There are good arguments for government involvement in just about anything, but increased individual decision making and decreased control of the individuals life are most emphatically NOT among them.
If you don't wanna pay for it, find someone else who will. Hey, they did it with HMOs, and look how well that worked out...
First off HMO's and NASA are rather different cases. Beyond that I don't think you can use HMO's as a "cover all" example of the efficacy of government involvement since the entire healthcare mess is largely the creation of government involvement.
Or are you simply providing your.sig with an illustrative example.
If you are a consumer who wanted a comparison to decide which kind of computer to buy, you are right the article was (mostly) useless.
BUT, for the audience the article is intended for - geeks, technophiles, nerds & propeller heads it was not pointless at all. On this forum in particular there are a lot of people that use neither Windows nor MacOS but other operating sytems which run happily on either processor. Even if there is no *practical* point there is always sheer geek curiosity - alot of us find such articles entertaining.
Might as well have Car and Driver running a comparison of a Jaguar S-type and a 10-ton dumptruck.
I don't think that the difference between a P4 and a G4 is quite as wide as that - and they are being marketed by both sides as roughly equivalent products. Most techie people may know which is the "dumptruck" and which the "Jaguar" but it is still interesting to see a technical explanation of WHY and precisely HOW they are so different.
For scifi that made me think I would have to list. the classics first: 1984, Brave New World, Frankenstein. Dune and The Foundation series made me think though I have to disagree with both authors. Cryptonomicon made me think just to understand the math - at the same time I was reading "Mathematics: Is God Silent" on religion and mathematics. On the topic of religion: C.S. Lewis's scifi religious allegories in the space trilogy are thought provoking- "That Hideous Strength" in particular is an interesting social commentary especially if you read it right after reading his nonfiction book on moral education "the Abolition of Man" I should also mention "Til We Have Faces" while on the subject of Lewis.
As for books other than scifi that have made me think I would have a hard time coming up with a list so I'll just mention some ones I've read fairly recently that made me think:
"Witness" by Whitaker Chambers
"The Gulag Archipelago" by Solzhenitsyn
(on an anti-communist kick - I tend to read somewhat related books at the same time)
"Democracy in America" by De Toqueville
"The Federalist Papers" by Madison et al.
(on a political philosophy kick)
"The Tragedy of American Compassion" by Marvin Olasky
(for the last election - I couldn't get myself to read Gore's book by way of balance.)
Very far from a complete list but I guess I've done a pretty good job of tipping my hand when it comes to my religious, philosophical and political biases.
Yeah, Niven will seem soo passe once we start building Ringworlds or Dyson Spheres, and he'll look like a 50's pulp fiction author once we find some actual living smoke rings.
LOL ! Fair enough, Niven's "fun with physics" is far enough out there that it won't be bypassed by technology anytime soon. But in a way you are proving my point - the significant thing you cite in his work is the clever scientific concept - not the story or insight into human nature. That is (almost) all there is in Niven's work: a clever science project with a so-so story strapped on to showcase it. On the other hand when Niven is collaborating with Jerry Pournelle I think the characters and the story are generally better than when he is writing alone. On the gripping hand...;)
When these visions of tomorrow *do* come true, or get a little too close for our liking, one of the first things that happens is that these books are examined again.
I have to agree with you - the author with the insight to "get it right" who is examining a trend he sees in society or is using the creative freedom of scifi to examine unchanging aspects of human nature will have grasped something that is "timeless" despite the potentially "dated" details his work will also contain. In those cases the quirky "dated" stage dressing can even be an asset that makes the telling of a great story more enjoyable. But when the story is *mostly* about the stage dressing and the plot is just an excuse for the clever "stage design" the story will not stand up over time or may only survive as a bit of quirky retro fluff.
Too much of the stuff in the scifi aisle is fluff the literary equivelant of "eye-candy". A few novels that aren't are probably grinding philosophical or political axes that won't be relevant in 50 years (they may be very good but may not be 'timeless'). A very few are probably truly great. It is just such a burden finding them - I love the genre but I really do get a hopeless feeling when I'm standing before the rack looking for something that will "make you think."
Agreed, notice the word "few" not "none." I would add Shelley's "Frankenstien" which I reread recently as another scifi classic. My rant has more to do with the geewiz shallowness of most contemporary scifi. Even the better authors are sometimes so caught up in the cleverness of their imaginary worlds that they fall down on the story. Niven's novels in particular are stories that serve as a showcase to illustrate some clever scifi idea ("Ringworld", "the Integral trees" etc.) rather than to tell a story that is great on it's own merits. Don't get me wrong, that fun with physics is the charm of Niven and what makes his books entertaining but I don't think it will "stand the test of time" as well as novels that are more multidimensional.
Unfortunately relatively few scifi authors will stand the test of time. Not because there is anything wrong with scifi but because "nothing is so dated as yesterdays vision of tommorow." Too many scifi authors are just glorying in a clever "vision of tommorow" (or of the mythic 'past' in the case of fantasy) and are not using that vision as a medium to tell a great story or display any insight into larger truths. They will be entertaining and popular for a day and then quickly fade. I have read many of the authors mentioned in other comments and many were very entertaining but few of them will be read 50 years from now.
I have loved scifi since I was a kid, but I often stand before rack upon rack of scifi novels at the local bookstore despairing of finding anything truly worth the time it takes to read. More and more I have turned to the classics section to find novels that have already proven themselves over time. For obvious reasons there seems to be a higher "signal to noise ratio" in that corner of the bookstore, the writing is better, the stories are less shallow and if many of the themes are sometimes familiar it is because of all the cheap knockoffs I've read before, often from the scifi aisle. I'm sure that there are a few, maybe even a lot of books in the scifi section that would satisfy but finding them is frustrating among so much dreck.
I don't believe you can conclude that she's technologically agnostic just because she's a professional photographer. There are some designers here at work who insist on using Macintoshes, for example. (not pro or con, here, just refuting agnosticism, okay?)
Fair enough, There are certain technical skills which are not technology agnostic (darkroom skills vs. photoshop - rubylith and a swivel knife vs. Quark). But these technicalities are secondary skills that serve the primary skill set of a designer or a photographer (a good eye for color, composition, etc.). You could make a similar argument for a computer programmer and be quite correct but these secondary skills are more important for a programmer than for a designer and more important for a designer than for a photographer. More of a programmers time and skills are expended on the particular details of the technology involved - more of a photographers (esp. a photojournalists) time is spent behind the camera than dealing with the technology either at a computer or in the dark room.
To the degree that technology impacts design or photography it has tended to *reduce* the importance of such technical skills. The whole point of a professional digital camera is to get rid of all the technical details and skills required in the darkroom so the photographer can focus on photography. She may concievably be nostalgic for the smell of developing chemicals but doing away with them is not threatening her employment.
Having said this, we are reacting according to an extremely compressed version of a doctoral dissertation... We don't really know the point she's making.
Good point and it would be an even better point to make in responce to the comment I was responding to: an arrogant and ignorant assumption that the only reason anyone could ever see a downside to adopting a new technology was ludditism motivated by fear of losing the market for ones skills. A dismissive opinion couched in technocratic arrogance and based on (as you point out) an extremely compressed summary of a doctoral dissertation. I would imagine (though this is conjecture) that the photographer was not likely to suggest that photojournalists abandon digital photography whose advantages in that particular field are significant - but probably concluded that the downside of a diminished or skewed historical record be minimised by policy or additional technology. Again, this is conjecture but even if that was not her conclusion it seems a reasonable response to the legitimate problem she raises.
Why won't they release iTUNE for other platforms when they are giving Quicktime away for free?... but who would buy a mac solely for iPOD?
The answers to the last question is nobody, BUT (and this will answer the first question) The iPod is not only a product designed to sell and earn the company profits but ALSO one part of a larger strategy to drive sales of Mac's. You may not buy a Mac just for iPod but you might for the whole package of hardware and sofware that integrate seamlessly with each other (iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, Mac, iPod, Cinema Display etc.)
Apple lost out on the advantages of licensing their OS, a business plan transition that is too late to make now and they may not have survived even in the early days when MacOS was vastly superior to DOS Apple's revenues have ALWAYS come from hardware. But building the whole widget has some advantages too and Apple is (finally) trying to exploit those advantages for all they are worth making hardware, software and peripherals that "just work" and "work together" and do so easily and intuitively in a way that would be very hard for a Wintel setup representing dozens of vendors (often working at cross purposes) to emulate.
Well, storage space and care for negatives isn't free, and people have to take intentional actions to properly perserve analogue images.
Two points:
1) Editing in the field. The film photographer in the field will keep ALL photos because he has no way of reviewing them - so they all get sent back to the office for review and for archiving. The digital photographer by contrast can review his shots and choose which ones are worthwile. He may be sending them over a modem from Mogadishu or the the wilds of North Afghanistan - he is only going to send a few. The others he may keep for his own archives or if his drive is getting full he may delete those that look completely useless. Storage may be cheap but photographers take ALOT of pictures and they are LARGE (high resolutions and low compression)
2) Storage back at the office: With traditional film it is easier to archive entire rolls of film than to archive individual images. And nearly every roll of film probably has one or maybe even two images that may someday be useful so it makes sense to have a policy of archiving all film even if 99% of the images are truly useless to the publisher and to the photographer. Digital storage by contrast makes it easy to delete pictures that are truly useless - and doing so has a cost savings even if it is only in the time it takes to peruse your photos for the shot you are looking for. Believe me sloging through an image archive looking for a good shot of something is a pain in the arse it is very practical to cull out all the shots you would never consider using. But a useless shot (blurry - bad light - poor composition - or maybe simply not 'dramatic' enough, or even not conforming to the publishers spin or prejudices?) may be very useful to a historian researching who was present? doing what? standing where? with what attitude or expression on their face?
Digital "film", regardless of media type, is SO cheap and so reuseable that the digital photographer takes MORE pictures, not less. Hey, they're free, right? Click click click click click. Argument inverted.
This is certainly true of the amatuer photographer who is now taking pictures more like the professionals she is writing about have been taking them ALL ALONG. I don't know if professionals are taking more pictures now because of digital 'film' but it would be hard for me to see how that would be possible considering how blase they were before about 'wasting' film.
Besides which she is a working photojournalist familiar with her own and her collegues practices - she is basing her dissertation not on supposition or conjecture (as you are) but on what is IN FACT happening. Journalists are in fact deleting 'useless' photos because they can, it's easy and it serves a practical purpose (less 'wasted' hard drive space).
Even if the hypothesis about "less digital photos remain" holds true (which is preposterous), certainly the accessibility of the digital images more than makes up for it.
Not if one of the deleted pictures was the one with the gunman on the grassy knoll;)
Obviously off-site backup of perfect-copy images is an impossibility in the land of real film, but a
nightly automated process in digital film land.
True and I think an advantage for digital 'film' but really irrelevant to her thesis which has more to do with the *intentional* culling of 'useless' data in the field and back at the office.
This is RUBBISH. A telegraph was ephemeral - a transmission and a disposable record of the message sent. Digital photography opens the doors to PERFECT, archival of INFINITE DURATION
Please note the words "in some ways" The similarity is in the effect of a new technology on the availability of historical records not the exact nature of tha cause of the effect. The invention of the telegraph tended to decrease the availablity of historically significant communications the invention of the digital camera may tend to decrease the availablity of historically significant images. As far as I know the invention of the electric can opener had no effect on the historical record.
If you're reloading every 24/36 shots, you're taking a lot less incidental shots than if your camera will hold 200+ images.
Again - only if you keep all 200 shots NO MATTER HOW USLESS THEY ARE TO YOU. No matter how cheap and permanent digital storage is most people still don't keep archives of data THAT ARE COMPLETELY USELESS TO THEM. And we are talking about a very significant quantity of data - storage may be cheap but there is still some cost to storing several terrabytes of information FOR NO PURPOSE (to you). Again she is basing this paper not on conjecture about what *might* be happening but what *is* happening - photographers are keeping the 'best' shots and permanently deleting the rest - they have no reason to do otherwise aside from a vague interest in preserving an historical record which is a secondary concern to their immediate job to get 'the shot' (out of hundreds of missed shots) and get it back to the office before their deadline.
Typical old-school elitism, pure and simple. There is nothing about digital photography that makes it fundamentally different from film.
Typical "new school" technocrat elitism, pure and simple that assumes that every technological advance is superior *in every respect* to it's predecessor. And that a computer geek knows more about photography than a mere photojournalist.
Oh please. I've got a consumer-grade digital camera that'll shoot over 1000 medium-res pictures without swapping storage. How long ago was this written?
Oh please, what exactly is the "Medium-res" of the pictures on your consumer-grade camera? I suppose it is at least 4 megapixels with minimal compresson (art directors hate jpeg artifacts) to be roughly equivalent to 35mm film? - that is the absolute minimum we are talking about here. If your trying to get the cover shot for a magazine you're talking 6.9 megapixels (after being cropped!!) 8x10@150lpi=2,300x3,000=6.9 megapixels - O.K. I know dpi doesn't really have to be double lpi but alot of people still use that rule of thumb and besides more and more quality magazines are printing at higher line frequencies)
"Please, please, please, don't let new technology make my entire life's work completely useless! Please continue paying me for my antiquated skills!" Sad.
Speaking of elitism and arrogance. The woman is a photographer - unlike us geeks her skills are technology 'agnostic' and not subject to becoming 'antiquated' or at least not until AI makes all human skills antiquated. As an immediate practical matter it does not matter to her whether she shoots pictures digitally or with film. What she is writing about is based not on conjecture or supposition but on her actual knowledge of the practices of herself and her collegues. They used to keep all of their shots because the technology made it difficult and useless to bother getting rid of the unused ones. Now they edit in the field to keep the best shots and permanently delete the ones that are 'useless' to them and their employers. The writer is pointing out that what is useless to a magazine or newspaper on deadline (the people paying to archive the shots) is exactly what is often useful to future historians. News organisations and photographers may indeed choose to keep archives of all photos they take no matter how useless for their purposes, especially as storage becomes cheaper and cheaper - but that decision will be an intentional act of charity rather than one of practical self-interest as it is now.
First off, should photographers really be taking pictures of everything in site, hoping one or two comes out ok?
Yes, as a matter of fact that is exactly what photagraphers do and what they should do. A wasted roll, or two, or thousand is cheap compared to a lost shot. Most photographers go through rolls and rolls for every shot that finally gets published. As it turns out being 'wasteful' is *exactly* what makes a better photographer.
At least flash cards are reusable... Also, how is deleting bad pictures any different from throwing out ones that turned out badly?
There is no differense - what the author of the article pointed out is that *no one* throws out film that turns out 'badly', because as you pointed out film is not reusable so there is no point in deleting unused or 'bad' shots.
I believe that the advantages of digital photography outweigh the disadvantages and I think will lead to a net increase of the historical record. But there is the potential that that history will be inadvertantly edited for content. The splashy, dramatic photo that conforms to the publishers spin on the story will be saved, but that photo is not always the one that most accurately records the event - it is certainly not as accurate an historic record as the entire mass of photos that were taken but rejected. Currently all those rejected photos are stored and can be looked at years later by the more objective, or at least differently prejudiced, eyes of an historian removed from the events by the passage of time. With digital photography the less dramatic but possibly more accurate photographic record may be lost because there was no immediate practical reason to keep it.
Your grandmother won't want to whip out a Flash card everytime someone wants to see a picture of her grandson
The author is not talking about your grandmother's snapshots but about news photographers who are more likely to witness, and record, significant historical events.
Thanks, I suppose the confusion was that I know many 'conservatives' would probably agree with your 'liberal rant' but then a more accurate designation for their political philosophy would probably be 'classical liberals', 'libertarians', and 'neo-conservatives' that have a liberal philosophy in both 19th and 20th century philosophical senses (libertarian and progressive) but are completely at odds with 'liberal' politics (in the most narrow 20th century political sense) To further muddy the idealogical waters even the pesimistic philosophicaly conservative 'paleo-conservatives' are seeking to conserve a liberal (19th century sense 'liberty') political & social structure.
On a more positive note
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Globalization
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We can stay and prop up our own puppet (that's worked well for us in the past, check out Vietnam, Central America, the Phillipines).
Or on a more positive note: Germany, Japan, Italy. Aside from vietnam even the nations you cite as failures were unlikely to be any better off and would perhaps of been worse off without our involvement. And from the point of view of the "boat people" even vietnam was apparantly better off under the rule of a US puppet government and in a state of war than under the subsequent totalitarian dictatorship.
The policy we are trying now (toppling the Taliban) does nothing for "the people of Afghanistan who are STARVING TO DEATH... How a few more years of us bombing them will help I don't know.
Is it supposed to? Toppling the Taliban is not primarily being done to benefit the Afghan people though in the long run it likely will. It is being done to remove a threat to us.
Besides all that, why are we targeting Afghanistan? There are lots of other places where people are starving.
Um... You see, there used to be two really big towers in New York City and then one morning.... But I guess you knew that. We are attacking Afghanistan because they are allies with and are protecting the organisation that attacked us. Al Queada will "pop up" in other places but those other places will either seek to arrest them or if they harbor them will share Afghanistans fate. Terrorists other than Al Queada already exist or will pop up in other places but the governments of those places will either seek to supress them or if they are supporting them will keep them on a short enough leash to prevent them from doing something stupid like attacking the U.S. and inviting the same kind of hell that the Taliban will suffer.
Also, we are "targeting" those other nations. Take the example of our "new favorite ally Pakistan" First off the terrorists that they support didn't attack America and when some terrorists that did attack America (in the first Trade Center bombing) where found in Pakistan they were arrested and turned over to us. Pakistan did not offer to turn them over to a neutral muslim country, or claim that Pashtun hospitality demanded them to protect their "guest" regardless of their crimes - they turned them over. Secondly I think we did address the fact that Pakistan supports terrorists, especially since while the terrorists supported by Pakistan are not the ones that attacked America they are in fact part of the same network. It is pretty clear that in the first few days after the Trade Center attack Pakistan was offered a choice, help us destroy the Al Queada network (that arguably you support) or there would be dire consequences. I don't know what exact consequences were threatened (or hinted at) but General Musharefs statement defending his decision to his people hinted that Pakistan had to support the U.S. or it would potentially "lose it's 'strategic assets'" That's code for it's nuclear missles. While Musharef was still pondering his decision the Pentagon very pointedly did NOT rule out the use of nuclear weapons in response to the attacks. It would be silly to even consider using nukes on the Taliban but what if another nuclear power refused to cooperate that was a known financial and military supporter of one of Al Queada's constituent organisations?
As for Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria - Saudi Arabia and Egypt do not support terrorists, quite the contrary, they had already been seeking to destroy their indigenious terrorist groups. I would imagine that they are under a great deal of pressure to seek out and crack down on financial and political backers of Al Queada but it is hard to see what more they could do. Syria as well is probably under a great deal of pressure, they support terrorism against Israel and may continue to do so under the protection that our practical need for Muslim coalition partners provides. But are probably running like hell from any group associated with bin laden or espousing direct attacks on the U.S. who knows they may already be providing us with intelligence on some of their past 'clients'
How about using a sensible concept in a country like that like "democracy" and "subsidy"
Exactly how are we to create a democracy and who would we subsidise? The fact that the Northern Alliance is a bunch of thugs is true but there is not really much else to work with there. You have to work with what exists. Afghanistan is a tribal/feudal society, I doubt that it has the cultural preconditions to support the democracy you envision - a king and a "loya jirga" council of tribal leaders (or 'warlords" as they are alternatively called) is Afghanistans best hope of stablity and some modicum of peace.
Remember this was a war against _terrorism_ NOT against the Taliban,
That is really a distinction without a difference. The Taliban and Al Queada are hopelessly intertwined and the destruction of one requires the destruction of the other. The Taliban was supposedly willing to give *one* terrorist up to a neutral country which would have done very little to stop terrorism. I doubt they would have even carried through but I bet the negotiation would have lasted until the Afghan winter.
Bombing the Red Cross is _not_ the sort of act that will increase stability in the region.
It might if there are secondary explosions after the Red Cross warehouse is bombed. I think it is obvious that the repeated bombing of the Red Cross warehouse is NOT a mistake. But I have a hard time coming up with a rationale for the bombing which is a PR fiasco and undermines our ability to act in the region. The only thing I can come up with is that we have good intelligence that the Taliban is using those warehouses to shelter it's military assets. We can hit anything we want in Afghanistan so the only hope the Taliban has of preserving high value targets is to put them places we will CHOOSE not to hit: like residential neighborhoods, mosques, hospitals and Red Cross warehouses. Another possiblity is that we intend to starve the Taliban out in the coming winter but that seems very unlikely since the core leadership and army would probably survive just fine and only innocent civilians would suffer - sadly that is exactly what we are doing in Iraq but if it was our intent in Afghanistan I doubt the government would be doing so much to highlight the plight of those same innocent civilians.
As a side note, I think the sanctions against Iraq are poorly thought out, lead to the suffering of innocents, are never likely to accomplish our goals, and spark Arab resentment (on the street - I doubt the governments of Iraq's rivals are *really* upset by it). But it is galling to have this pointed out by the same people that opposed the use of military force and wanted to "give sanctions more time to work" and who now ignore the real issues that caused us to impose sanctions in the first place. Iraq is a "rogue nation" it supports terrorists and is actively seeking to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. It has already used such weapons (chemical) in the past and would almost certainly use them again in the future if it wasn't afraid of a punishing response from the much maligned U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and the gulf states.
Slashdot Mirror
1) If the detainee is told that he is being monitored than he will say nothing to incriminate himself, thus defeating the purpose of monitoring.
1A) But the detainee will also not be able to communicate effectively with his coconspiritors on the outside. Maybe you don't find out as much about the crimes he and his friends are planning but at least you disrupt his ability to commit them.
1B) It's not even true. Many prisoners already have their phone calls (other than to their lawyer) monitored WITH their knowledge and STILL slip up during the flow of conversation.
2) This cant be strictly legal, any information garnered in this way may be challenged and thrown out, again defeating the purpose.
2A) I don't think the law is as clear as you think on this matter.
2B) You may be right though about the legal issue, but the FBI has two tasks which in this case potentially conflict. Their traditional law enforcement task is to bring the guilty to justice which means they have to follow all the niceties of protecting the accused's civil liberties or lose their case because of the exclusionary rule. The other task is to act as a domestic intelligence (or counterintelligence) agency which involves gathering intelligence (in this case to prevent future attacks) regardless of whether or not that intelligence is gathered in a way that will be admissable in court. (sort of like MI6 in the UK which is NOT a law enforcement agency and so has no defacto restrictions on it's methods but also no dejure authority - thus their number one rule is: Thou shalt not get caught) After 9/11 the FBI had a new mandate to put more emphasis on the intelligence gathering rather than only on law enforcement.
3) Assuming the Govt. has arrested over 1000 people so far, and that rate of arrest continues, how many man hours are going to be used up carrying this out. Hours which could be better used in other ways assuming that monitoring will achieve nothing.
Do you have a better way for them to spend their time? Honestly if you know of any more promising leads I would hope that you have already informed the FBI about them. A lot of investigative work is following up every lead or *possiblity of developing a lead* no matter how unpromising it may be. Monitoring the conversations of people you are already suspicious enough to detain is a pretty promising source of future leads.
4) If this does go ahead, how long will it be before its extended out to other cases.
A fair concern but then again the "slippery slope" argument could as easily by used to prevent ANY action by police. "If they put murderers in jail it's only a matter of time before they put jaywalkers in jail! We must protest to stop the jailing of murderers"
5) And if there is no lawyer/client privledge than how can lawyers give clients the best defence possible, which even guilty people deserve, never mind those that have been wrongly accused.
5A) From what I understand this only applies to phone conversations so their right to have confidential conversations with their lawyers is not being denied only the privilege of having private phone conversations which does not seem that unreasonable a restriction considering the number of organised crime figures that manage to run criminal enterprises from jail.
5B) Just a niggling point - the guilty DO NOT deserve the best defence possible. They only thing they deserve is to be punished for their crimes. They have a RIGHT to the best defense possible because we don't know whether they are the guilty or the wrongfully accused. If we KNEW they were guilty we would not need the whole complication of the judicial process.
Frankly, the government should rethink its policy and seek reimbursement from thrillseekers.
Um, these particular thrillseekers ARE the government (UK government that is). From their website: "QinetiQ comprises the greater part of DERA, the British Government's 'Defence Evaluation and Research Agency'" While many posts about this story seem to think that this is a couple of guys puttering about their garage looking to get an honorable mention in the Darwin Awards they are in fact doing military research. For a quick explanation on why a modern military might be interested in balloons check out this Scientific American article on modern "observations ballons" or "Aerostat Radar System" as the U.S. military calls it.
Already have it Well, something like that at least. I also remember seeing something about a Navy project looking into using balloons to replace the E2C (you know those little mini-awacs they fly from carriers) Seems like a crazy idea since I doubt you would want a tethered balloon if you ran into rough weather and an untethered balloon would just float around on the wind (what little there is at that altitude) not going where you want it to go.
A lot of people have made comments similar comments but at the risk of being modded down -1 Redundant I just have to rant.
.com when the web was new but is part of the problem now that it has grown so large. If .biz or .info have any success businesses are just going to register their name under all TLD's to avoid potential confusion. Ford Motor Co. is not going to let a site about the artist Henry Chapman Ford, the The Ford Diner or the Ford Law firm get the domain ford.biz. It seems the logical solution would have been to create more specific TLD's (ford.law, ford.art) and even more importantly make easier and encourage the use of existing geographic TLD's (i.e. ford.ma.us) for local brick and morter businesses who would find a TLD indicating their physical location a distinct advantage. The only new TLD that seems that it *might* help is .name which could get personal and family domains out of the .com TLD and would also provide those sites protection from companies suing them for the use of their own family name.
I haven't been following the convoluted politics of adding new tld's but the end result seems just spectacularly stupid. There is definitely a need for change but the new domains don't seem like they are going to help much at all. They are too generic which was fine for
...instead of mothballing everything because NASA was originally created for military and defence issues ithas been able to adapt to become a huge foundation for scientific research
;-)
Yes, that is true but since scientific research is not a fundamental purpose of government or an urgent need NASA's budget has been and will continue to suffer.
The problem is that funding fundamental reseach that does not have direct economic gain, whether through products or important patents, runs into the prisoners dilema. By having a government that forces us to pay for things that are benifitial for all of society, ie schools, infrastructure, fundamental reseach, so they actually move forward.
A much better argument than the one I was responding to - remember I said there *were* arguments for government involvement but that individual decision making and freedom where not among them. I am not against government funding for scientific research but I recognise that it is a secondary priority for government. When it is funded it has for the most part been tied to governments primary goals (usually national defense) just as tightly as privately funded research has been tied to the primary goals of those funding it (profits). Research that does not serve the primary goals of those funding it is done on the margins in either case (admittedly the 'margins' of government are wider)
To be fair to the idea of privatising NASA alot of the really expensive stuff they are doing is NOT primary scientific research but the (now) more prosaic (and potentially profitable) work of moving stuff into orbit. It will not matter to a research satellite that it was put into orbit by a government owned and operated rocket or by a private for-profit company. Also by your reasoning UMASS is a better research university than MIT because it is a public university and MIT is a private university. You may point out that much of the research at MIT is funded by government but that would likely be the case at a privatised NASA as well.
Sure some of these programs are not getting the desired results, but imagine the social retardation if public schools relied on private sector money with strings attached, like forcing advertisements in class.
We don't need to imagine a hypothetical scenario here. We already have many private schools most of which are not known to produce "social retardation" whereas that does seem to be the normal product of certain public schools.
It is interesting that when most powerful societies start to crumble it begins with an usurping of power and quickly followed with not funding scientific research, espeically NON-PROFITABLE research.
Can you give me some concrete examples? I can see the usurping part though I think you would find as many examples in history of usurpation preceding a rise to power as well (one thinks of Julius Ceaser crossing the Rubicon) but I'm not as sure you could make a case that ending the funding of non-profitable scientific research was the cause of a societies decline as opposed to a symptom of it.
If you are right though I suppose we should be glad Gore's attempt to steal the election failed
I think the leaders of the country have really missed the point of the space program... We'd rather fight some pointless war in Afghanistan that we won't win, and I bet that costs a pretty penny.
I think you have really missed the point of government or at least the stated "point" of the US government. Check the beginning of the U.S. Declaration of Independance and the Preamble to the Constitution for the governments stated purpose. Scientific advancement doesn't make the list but protecting citizens right to life, "providing a common defense" and "ensuring domestic tranquility" are prominently mentioned. Science is a "one off" activity at best.
As for the war being pointless: Even if scientific advancement is a higher priority than "providing a common defense" of our lives and "domestic tranquility" (if I understand your priorities) impoverished, insecure or dead people are generally not very good at advancing science so if only as a practical matter to protect the space program we should probably try to defend our citizens from being killed and our society from massive disruptions by al Queada. It seems to me we have three options for an overall strategy.
1) An offensive strategy - We destroy al Queada. Since they are taking refuge with their allies in Afghanistan this entails a war in Afghanistan.
2) A defensive strategy - We could leave al Queada alone but build an impregnable defense. At a minimum this would probably require closing our borders, at least to arabs and muslims. Since it is only a matter of time before they develop or steal nukes we would have to restrict access to our ports,international air travel etc. and move anything we don't want nuked away from our borders with Mexico and Canada. We would also want SDI in case they use a more conventional nuclear delivery method.
3) Surrender: We could seek to appease them. This is not a sure fire strategy (just ask Neville Chamberlain) It would be particularly difficult since al Queada has not even claimed responsiblity let alone made any specific demands. Also this is unlikely to work in the short run since even if we complied with (what we imagine are) their demands I doubt we could do so quickly enough to stop existing attacks that are planned. At an absolute minimum this would require pulling all our troops out of any muslim land, ending aid to Isreal, Bosnia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Phillipenes and India (for the sake of Kashmeer) and standing by as those nations adopted an Islamic "Republic" government essentially identical to the Taliban. It would probably also include a rather large sum of "danegeld". It may also entail ceding Spain to Morroco since bin Laden has decried the "tragedy of Andalusia" as fervently as the tragedy of Palestine. At worst it may entail adopting Islamic government ourselves though that would probably be a long time out.
A sane strategy should probably involve some aspect of all three. Having an immigration and visa program which is more security focussed and pursuing foreign policies that don't alienate a large segment of the world's population are both important. Destroying a professed enemy with the capablity and inclination to attack and kill you is an absolute necessity.
The fact that the private sector invariably gives rise to the worst possible situation for the consumer...
You are so right. Just the other day after 1.5 hours in the line at the DMV I was pondering "Why can't a trip to the grocery store be as simple as this?"
How did it ever get to the point where one of our greatest and proudest institutions needs to privitize one of their greatest resources in order to keep going?
...everyone would rather let them get on with and have removed the intolerable burden of decision making.
We no longer have the same urgent need for a space program that we had when we first developed it. NASA was never *just* about idle scientific curiosity. It was about developing the technologies needed for national defense and showing that technical superiority off to the rest of the world, for the sake of national prestige and it's accompanying international influence. When the Russians sent up Sputnik we were not shocked and dismayed because we thought that they might find out interesting facts about quasars before us but because they demonstrated the technical ability required to make *other* things like ICBM's, spy & communications satellites etc. We went to the moon to prove to ourselves and the world that we were capable of even more than the Russians - scientific exploration was a nice justification and byproduct. Today we have proven our technological, economic and military superiority, NASA no longer has those other more urgent (and more fundamentally related to the actual purpose of government) tasks and is left with the scientific exploration pretext and beaurocratic inertia.
No other country in the world comes close to the US in terms of economic might, and yet it is near-third-world nations like China that are now expanding their space programs as we are selling off ours
China is expanding their space program for the same reasons we no longer have. They are developing the technology to build ICBM's. Prior to the leaks of technology from western firms for the sake of the Chinese space program they did not have missles capable of hitting the continental USA - now they do. They are also concerned with proving their national greatness to placate their own populace and to increase their international influence. And finally as a very nice side bonus (and their pretext) they are acting as a private company would and seeking to make a profit. India wants to do the same things - particularly because of their rivalry with China.
No, this is just another symptom of the long, slow decline of the US into a narcissistic corporate paradise as the rest of the world forges on ahead of us into the future.
If the corporations can find a way to make a buck off of space we will far surpass the rest of the world in forging ahead into the future.
It seems the only people here with any kind of enthusiasm are the ones that want to control your lives...
In general it is government that *controls* your life - just think about what the word "government" means. In this example I as an individual may not WANT to support the space program but I am forced to by the government under the threat of fines, imprisonment and if I resist the ultimate force of government is the policemans gun. If I don't want to buy a Wintel computer I may forgoe using some computer programs and have occasional compatibility problems transfering files to other computers but Bill Gates can't put me in jail.
Again, you have it 180 degrees backwards. The private sector is generally a realm of many choices and lots of decisions. Government usually does not give you much choice. In the private sector I have a decision whether or not to support a non-profit scientific organization seeking to land on the moon. There may be many such non-profits to choose from or there may be any number of similar commercial projects whose products (space tours, astroid mined minerals, whatever) I have the decision to buy or not. If government decides to support such I project my only decision is whether I'm willing to go to jail to NOT support the project.
There are good arguments for government involvement in just about anything, but increased individual decision making and decreased control of the individuals life are most emphatically NOT among them.
If you don't wanna pay for it, find someone else who will. Hey, they did it with HMOs, and look how well that worked out...
.sig with an illustrative example.
First off HMO's and NASA are rather different cases. Beyond that I don't think you can use HMO's as a "cover all" example of the efficacy of government involvement since the entire healthcare mess is largely the creation of government involvement.
Or are you simply providing your
If you are a consumer who wanted a comparison to decide which kind of computer to buy, you are right the article was (mostly) useless.
BUT, for the audience the article is intended for - geeks, technophiles, nerds & propeller heads it was not pointless at all. On this forum in particular there are a lot of people that use neither Windows nor MacOS but other operating sytems which run happily on either processor. Even if there is no *practical* point there is always sheer geek curiosity - alot of us find such articles entertaining.
Might as well have Car and Driver running a comparison of a Jaguar S-type and a 10-ton dumptruck.
I don't think that the difference between a P4 and a G4 is quite as wide as that - and they are being marketed by both sides as roughly equivalent products. Most techie people may know which is the "dumptruck" and which the "Jaguar" but it is still interesting to see a technical explanation of WHY and precisely HOW they are so different.
For scifi that made me think I would have to list. the classics first: 1984, Brave New World, Frankenstein. Dune and The Foundation series made me think though I have to disagree with both authors. Cryptonomicon made me think just to understand the math - at the same time I was reading "Mathematics: Is God Silent" on religion and mathematics. On the topic of religion: C.S. Lewis's scifi religious allegories in the space trilogy are thought provoking- "That Hideous Strength" in particular is an interesting social commentary especially if you read it right after reading his nonfiction book on moral education "the Abolition of Man" I should also mention "Til We Have Faces" while on the subject of Lewis.
As for books other than scifi that have made me think I would have a hard time coming up with a list so I'll just mention some ones I've read fairly recently that made me think:
"Witness" by Whitaker Chambers
"The Gulag Archipelago" by Solzhenitsyn
(on an anti-communist kick - I tend to read somewhat related books at the same time)
"Democracy in America" by De Toqueville
"The Federalist Papers" by Madison et al.
(on a political philosophy kick)
"The Tragedy of American Compassion" by Marvin Olasky
(for the last election - I couldn't get myself to read Gore's book by way of balance.)
Very far from a complete list but I guess I've done a pretty good job of tipping my hand when it comes to my religious, philosophical and political biases.
Yeah, Niven will seem soo passe once we start building Ringworlds or Dyson Spheres, and he'll look like a 50's pulp fiction author once we find some actual living smoke rings.
;)
LOL ! Fair enough, Niven's "fun with physics" is far enough out there that it won't be bypassed by technology anytime soon. But in a way you are proving my point - the significant thing you cite in his work is the clever scientific concept - not the story or insight into human nature. That is (almost) all there is in Niven's work: a clever science project with a so-so story strapped on to showcase it. On the other hand when Niven is collaborating with Jerry Pournelle I think the characters and the story are generally better than when he is writing alone. On the gripping hand...
When these visions of tomorrow *do* come true, or get a little too close for our liking, one of the first things that happens is that these books are examined again.
I have to agree with you - the author with the insight to "get it right" who is examining a trend he sees in society or is using the creative freedom of scifi to examine unchanging aspects of human nature will have grasped something that is "timeless" despite the potentially "dated" details his work will also contain. In those cases the quirky "dated" stage dressing can even be an asset that makes the telling of a great story more enjoyable. But when the story is *mostly* about the stage dressing and the plot is just an excuse for the clever "stage design" the story will not stand up over time or may only survive as a bit of quirky retro fluff.
Too much of the stuff in the scifi aisle is fluff the literary equivelant of "eye-candy". A few novels that aren't are probably grinding philosophical or political axes that won't be relevant in 50 years (they may be very good but may not be 'timeless'). A very few are probably truly great. It is just such a burden finding them - I love the genre but I really do get a hopeless feeling when I'm standing before the rack looking for something that will "make you think."
er, two words: Jules Verne.
Agreed, notice the word "few" not "none." I would add Shelley's "Frankenstien" which I reread recently as another scifi classic. My rant has more to do with the geewiz shallowness of most contemporary scifi. Even the better authors are sometimes so caught up in the cleverness of their imaginary worlds that they fall down on the story. Niven's novels in particular are stories that serve as a showcase to illustrate some clever scifi idea ("Ringworld", "the Integral trees" etc.) rather than to tell a story that is great on it's own merits. Don't get me wrong, that fun with physics is the charm of Niven and what makes his books entertaining but I don't think it will "stand the test of time" as well as novels that are more multidimensional.
Unfortunately relatively few scifi authors will stand the test of time. Not because there is anything wrong with scifi but because "nothing is so dated as yesterdays vision of tommorow." Too many scifi authors are just glorying in a clever "vision of tommorow" (or of the mythic 'past' in the case of fantasy) and are not using that vision as a medium to tell a great story or display any insight into larger truths. They will be entertaining and popular for a day and then quickly fade. I have read many of the authors mentioned in other comments and many were very entertaining but few of them will be read 50 years from now.
I have loved scifi since I was a kid, but I often stand before rack upon rack of scifi novels at the local bookstore despairing of finding anything truly worth the time it takes to read. More and more I have turned to the classics section to find novels that have already proven themselves over time. For obvious reasons there seems to be a higher "signal to noise ratio" in that corner of the bookstore, the writing is better, the stories are less shallow and if many of the themes are sometimes familiar it is because of all the cheap knockoffs I've read before, often from the scifi aisle. I'm sure that there are a few, maybe even a lot of books in the scifi section that would satisfy but finding them is frustrating among so much dreck.
I don't believe you can conclude that she's technologically agnostic just because she's a professional photographer. There are some designers here at work who insist on using Macintoshes, for example. (not pro or con, here, just refuting agnosticism, okay?)
Fair enough, There are certain technical skills which are not technology agnostic (darkroom skills vs. photoshop - rubylith and a swivel knife vs. Quark). But these technicalities are secondary skills that serve the primary skill set of a designer or a photographer (a good eye for color, composition, etc.). You could make a similar argument for a computer programmer and be quite correct but these secondary skills are more important for a programmer than for a designer and more important for a designer than for a photographer. More of a programmers time and skills are expended on the particular details of the technology involved - more of a photographers (esp. a photojournalists) time is spent behind the camera than dealing with the technology either at a computer or in the dark room.
To the degree that technology impacts design or photography it has tended to *reduce* the importance of such technical skills. The whole point of a professional digital camera is to get rid of all the technical details and skills required in the darkroom so the photographer can focus on photography. She may concievably be nostalgic for the smell of developing chemicals but doing away with them is not threatening her employment.
Having said this, we are reacting according to an extremely compressed version of a doctoral dissertation... We don't really know the point she's making.
Good point and it would be an even better point to make in responce to the comment I was responding to: an arrogant and ignorant assumption that the only reason anyone could ever see a downside to adopting a new technology was ludditism motivated by fear of losing the market for ones skills. A dismissive opinion couched in technocratic arrogance and based on (as you point out) an extremely compressed summary of a doctoral dissertation. I would imagine (though this is conjecture) that the photographer was not likely to suggest that photojournalists abandon digital photography whose advantages in that particular field are significant - but probably concluded that the downside of a diminished or skewed historical record be minimised by policy or additional technology. Again, this is conjecture but even if that was not her conclusion it seems a reasonable response to the legitimate problem she raises.
Why won't they release iTUNE for other platforms when they are giving Quicktime away for free?... but who would buy a mac solely for iPOD?
The answers to the last question is nobody, BUT (and this will answer the first question) The iPod is not only a product designed to sell and earn the company profits but ALSO one part of a larger strategy to drive sales of Mac's. You may not buy a Mac just for iPod but you might for the whole package of hardware and sofware that integrate seamlessly with each other (iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, Mac, iPod, Cinema Display etc.)
Apple lost out on the advantages of licensing their OS, a business plan transition that is too late to make now and they may not have survived even in the early days when MacOS was vastly superior to DOS Apple's revenues have ALWAYS come from hardware. But building the whole widget has some advantages too and Apple is (finally) trying to exploit those advantages for all they are worth making hardware, software and peripherals that "just work" and "work together" and do so easily and intuitively in a way that would be very hard for a Wintel setup representing dozens of vendors (often working at cross purposes) to emulate.
Well, storage space and care for negatives isn't free, and people have to take intentional actions to properly perserve analogue images.
Two points:
1) Editing in the field. The film photographer in the field will keep ALL photos because he has no way of reviewing them - so they all get sent back to the office for review and for archiving. The digital photographer by contrast can review his shots and choose which ones are worthwile. He may be sending them over a modem from Mogadishu or the the wilds of North Afghanistan - he is only going to send a few. The others he may keep for his own archives or if his drive is getting full he may delete those that look completely useless. Storage may be cheap but photographers take ALOT of pictures and they are LARGE (high resolutions and low compression)
2) Storage back at the office: With traditional film it is easier to archive entire rolls of film than to archive individual images. And nearly every roll of film probably has one or maybe even two images that may someday be useful so it makes sense to have a policy of archiving all film even if 99% of the images are truly useless to the publisher and to the photographer. Digital storage by contrast makes it easy to delete pictures that are truly useless - and doing so has a cost savings even if it is only in the time it takes to peruse your photos for the shot you are looking for. Believe me sloging through an image archive looking for a good shot of something is a pain in the arse it is very practical to cull out all the shots you would never consider using. But a useless shot (blurry - bad light - poor composition - or maybe simply not 'dramatic' enough, or even not conforming to the publishers spin or prejudices?) may be very useful to a historian researching who was present? doing what? standing where? with what attitude or expression on their face?
Digital "film", regardless of media type, is SO cheap and so reuseable that the digital photographer takes MORE pictures, not less. Hey, they're free, right? Click click click click click. Argument inverted.
;)
This is certainly true of the amatuer photographer who is now taking pictures more like the professionals she is writing about have been taking them ALL ALONG. I don't know if professionals are taking more pictures now because of digital 'film' but it would be hard for me to see how that would be possible considering how blase they were before about 'wasting' film.
Besides which she is a working photojournalist familiar with her own and her collegues practices - she is basing her dissertation not on supposition or conjecture (as you are) but on what is IN FACT happening. Journalists are in fact deleting 'useless' photos because they can, it's easy and it serves a practical purpose (less 'wasted' hard drive space).
Even if the hypothesis about "less digital photos remain" holds true (which is preposterous), certainly the accessibility of the digital images more than makes up for it.
Not if one of the deleted pictures was the one with the gunman on the grassy knoll
Obviously off-site backup of perfect-copy images is an impossibility in the land of real film, but a nightly automated process in digital film land.
True and I think an advantage for digital 'film' but really irrelevant to her thesis which has more to do with the *intentional* culling of 'useless' data in the field and back at the office.
This is RUBBISH. A telegraph was ephemeral - a transmission and a disposable record of the message sent. Digital photography opens the doors to PERFECT, archival of INFINITE DURATION
Please note the words "in some ways" The similarity is in the effect of a new technology on the availability of historical records not the exact nature of tha cause of the effect. The invention of the telegraph tended to decrease the availablity of historically significant communications the invention of the digital camera may tend to decrease the availablity of historically significant images. As far as I know the invention of the electric can opener had no effect on the historical record.
If you're reloading every 24/36 shots, you're taking a lot less incidental shots than if your camera will hold 200+ images.
Again - only if you keep all 200 shots NO MATTER HOW USLESS THEY ARE TO YOU. No matter how cheap and permanent digital storage is most people still don't keep archives of data THAT ARE COMPLETELY USELESS TO THEM. And we are talking about a very significant quantity of data - storage may be cheap but there is still some cost to storing several terrabytes of information FOR NO PURPOSE (to you). Again she is basing this paper not on conjecture about what *might* be happening but what *is* happening - photographers are keeping the 'best' shots and permanently deleting the rest - they have no reason to do otherwise aside from a vague interest in preserving an historical record which is a secondary concern to their immediate job to get 'the shot' (out of hundreds of missed shots) and get it back to the office before their deadline.
LOL - Thanks, I needed a laugh. You have the jargon down pat.
Typical old-school elitism, pure and simple. There is nothing about digital photography that makes it fundamentally different from film.
Typical "new school" technocrat elitism, pure and simple that assumes that every technological advance is superior *in every respect* to it's predecessor. And that a computer geek knows more about photography than a mere photojournalist.
Oh please. I've got a consumer-grade digital camera that'll shoot over 1000 medium-res pictures without swapping storage. How long ago was this written?
Oh please, what exactly is the "Medium-res" of the pictures on your consumer-grade camera? I suppose it is at least 4 megapixels with minimal compresson (art directors hate jpeg artifacts) to be roughly equivalent to 35mm film? - that is the absolute minimum we are talking about here. If your trying to get the cover shot for a magazine you're talking 6.9 megapixels (after being cropped!!) 8x10@150lpi=2,300x3,000=6.9 megapixels - O.K. I know dpi doesn't really have to be double lpi but alot of people still use that rule of thumb and besides more and more quality magazines are printing at higher line frequencies)
"Please, please, please, don't let new technology make my entire life's work completely useless! Please continue paying me for my antiquated skills!" Sad.
Speaking of elitism and arrogance. The woman is a photographer - unlike us geeks her skills are technology 'agnostic' and not subject to becoming 'antiquated' or at least not until AI makes all human skills antiquated. As an immediate practical matter it does not matter to her whether she shoots pictures digitally or with film. What she is writing about is based not on conjecture or supposition but on her actual knowledge of the practices of herself and her collegues. They used to keep all of their shots because the technology made it difficult and useless to bother getting rid of the unused ones. Now they edit in the field to keep the best shots and permanently delete the ones that are 'useless' to them and their employers. The writer is pointing out that what is useless to a magazine or newspaper on deadline (the people paying to archive the shots) is exactly what is often useful to future historians. News organisations and photographers may indeed choose to keep archives of all photos they take no matter how useless for their purposes, especially as storage becomes cheaper and cheaper - but that decision will be an intentional act of charity rather than one of practical self-interest as it is now.
First off, should photographers really be taking pictures of everything in site, hoping one or two comes out ok?
Yes, as a matter of fact that is exactly what photagraphers do and what they should do. A wasted roll, or two, or thousand is cheap compared to a lost shot. Most photographers go through rolls and rolls for every shot that finally gets published. As it turns out being 'wasteful' is *exactly* what makes a better photographer.
At least flash cards are reusable... Also, how is deleting bad pictures any different from throwing out ones that turned out badly?
There is no differense - what the author of the article pointed out is that *no one* throws out film that turns out 'badly', because as you pointed out film is not reusable so there is no point in deleting unused or 'bad' shots.
I believe that the advantages of digital photography outweigh the disadvantages and I think will lead to a net increase of the historical record. But there is the potential that that history will be inadvertantly edited for content. The splashy, dramatic photo that conforms to the publishers spin on the story will be saved, but that photo is not always the one that most accurately records the event - it is certainly not as accurate an historic record as the entire mass of photos that were taken but rejected. Currently all those rejected photos are stored and can be looked at years later by the more objective, or at least differently prejudiced, eyes of an historian removed from the events by the passage of time. With digital photography the less dramatic but possibly more accurate photographic record may be lost because there was no immediate practical reason to keep it.
Your grandmother won't want to whip out a Flash card everytime someone wants to see a picture of her grandson
The author is not talking about your grandmother's snapshots but about news photographers who are more likely to witness, and record, significant historical events.
Thanks, I suppose the confusion was that I know many 'conservatives' would probably agree with your 'liberal rant' but then a more accurate designation for their political philosophy would probably be 'classical liberals', 'libertarians', and 'neo-conservatives' that have a liberal philosophy in both 19th and 20th century philosophical senses (libertarian and progressive) but are completely at odds with 'liberal' politics (in the most narrow 20th century political sense) To further muddy the idealogical waters even the pesimistic philosophicaly conservative 'paleo-conservatives' are seeking to conserve a liberal (19th century sense 'liberty') political & social structure.
We can stay and prop up our own puppet (that's worked well for us in the past, check out Vietnam, Central America, the Phillipines).
Or on a more positive note: Germany, Japan, Italy. Aside from vietnam even the nations you cite as failures were unlikely to be any better off and would perhaps of been worse off without our involvement. And from the point of view of the "boat people" even vietnam was apparantly better off under the rule of a US puppet government and in a state of war than under the subsequent totalitarian dictatorship.
The policy we are trying now (toppling the Taliban) does nothing for "the people of Afghanistan who are STARVING TO DEATH... How a few more years of us bombing them will help I don't know.
Is it supposed to? Toppling the Taliban is not primarily being done to benefit the Afghan people though in the long run it likely will. It is being done to remove a threat to us.
Besides all that, why are we targeting Afghanistan? There are lots of other places where people are starving.
Um... You see, there used to be two really big towers in New York City and then one morning.... But I guess you knew that. We are attacking Afghanistan because they are allies with and are protecting the organisation that attacked us. Al Queada will "pop up" in other places but those other places will either seek to arrest them or if they harbor them will share Afghanistans fate. Terrorists other than Al Queada already exist or will pop up in other places but the governments of those places will either seek to supress them or if they are supporting them will keep them on a short enough leash to prevent them from doing something stupid like attacking the U.S. and inviting the same kind of hell that the Taliban will suffer.
Also, we are "targeting" those other nations. Take the example of our "new favorite ally Pakistan" First off the terrorists that they support didn't attack America and when some terrorists that did attack America (in the first Trade Center bombing) where found in Pakistan they were arrested and turned over to us. Pakistan did not offer to turn them over to a neutral muslim country, or claim that Pashtun hospitality demanded them to protect their "guest" regardless of their crimes - they turned them over. Secondly I think we did address the fact that Pakistan supports terrorists, especially since while the terrorists supported by Pakistan are not the ones that attacked America they are in fact part of the same network. It is pretty clear that in the first few days after the Trade Center attack Pakistan was offered a choice, help us destroy the Al Queada network (that arguably you support) or there would be dire consequences. I don't know what exact consequences were threatened (or hinted at) but General Musharefs statement defending his decision to his people hinted that Pakistan had to support the U.S. or it would potentially "lose it's 'strategic assets'" That's code for it's nuclear missles. While Musharef was still pondering his decision the Pentagon very pointedly did NOT rule out the use of nuclear weapons in response to the attacks. It would be silly to even consider using nukes on the Taliban but what if another nuclear power refused to cooperate that was a known financial and military supporter of one of Al Queada's constituent organisations?
As for Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria - Saudi Arabia and Egypt do not support terrorists, quite the contrary, they had already been seeking to destroy their indigenious terrorist groups. I would imagine that they are under a great deal of pressure to seek out and crack down on financial and political backers of Al Queada but it is hard to see what more they could do. Syria as well is probably under a great deal of pressure, they support terrorism against Israel and may continue to do so under the protection that our practical need for Muslim coalition partners provides. But are probably running like hell from any group associated with bin laden or espousing direct attacks on the U.S. who knows they may already be providing us with intelligence on some of their past 'clients'
How about using a sensible concept in a country like that like "democracy" and "subsidy"
Exactly how are we to create a democracy and who would we subsidise? The fact that the Northern Alliance is a bunch of thugs is true but there is not really much else to work with there. You have to work with what exists. Afghanistan is a tribal/feudal society, I doubt that it has the cultural preconditions to support the democracy you envision - a king and a "loya jirga" council of tribal leaders (or 'warlords" as they are alternatively called) is Afghanistans best hope of stablity and some modicum of peace.
Remember this was a war against _terrorism_ NOT against the Taliban,
That is really a distinction without a difference. The Taliban and Al Queada are hopelessly intertwined and the destruction of one requires the destruction of the other. The Taliban was supposedly willing to give *one* terrorist up to a neutral country which would have done very little to stop terrorism. I doubt they would have even carried through but I bet the negotiation would have lasted until the Afghan winter.
Bombing the Red Cross is _not_ the sort of act that will increase stability in the region.
It might if there are secondary explosions after the Red Cross warehouse is bombed. I think it is obvious that the repeated bombing of the Red Cross warehouse is NOT a mistake. But I have a hard time coming up with a rationale for the bombing which is a PR fiasco and undermines our ability to act in the region. The only thing I can come up with is that we have good intelligence that the Taliban is using those warehouses to shelter it's military assets. We can hit anything we want in Afghanistan so the only hope the Taliban has of preserving high value targets is to put them places we will CHOOSE not to hit: like residential neighborhoods, mosques, hospitals and Red Cross warehouses. Another possiblity is that we intend to starve the Taliban out in the coming winter but that seems very unlikely since the core leadership and army would probably survive just fine and only innocent civilians would suffer - sadly that is exactly what we are doing in Iraq but if it was our intent in Afghanistan I doubt the government would be doing so much to highlight the plight of those same innocent civilians.
As a side note, I think the sanctions against Iraq are poorly thought out, lead to the suffering of innocents, are never likely to accomplish our goals, and spark Arab resentment (on the street - I doubt the governments of Iraq's rivals are *really* upset by it). But it is galling to have this pointed out by the same people that opposed the use of military force and wanted to "give sanctions more time to work" and who now ignore the real issues that caused us to impose sanctions in the first place. Iraq is a "rogue nation" it supports terrorists and is actively seeking to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. It has already used such weapons (chemical) in the past and would almost certainly use them again in the future if it wasn't afraid of a punishing response from the much maligned U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and the gulf states.