I call BS!
Who, specifically, died from taping themselves in their house? The oft-cited problem with that suggestion is that it doesn't make houses airtight, so it wouldn't asphyxiate anyone, nor would it protect them from chemical weapons.
You only think this way because you're not looking hard enough to find out how it's our fault.
It's hard to believe it's nearly 2007 and people like you still haven't figured out that every ecological problem in the world is our fault. Or, more specifically, yours and mine.
Oh, you say you just wanted to sit down and enjoy an episode of Battlestar Galactica on DVD? Well thanks for wrecking the Amazon and feeding radium to starving Indian children you fascist! You just bought your girlfriend a dozen roses? Oh how nice. Did you realize those roses were shipped in a vehicle that burned fuel from the Middle East that funds oil sheiks that funded terrorism that killed my neighbors grandmother in Israel? Real nice, you Nazi. I hope your girlfriend thinks those flowers were worth having a poor old woman's head stomped in.
If it sounds like I'm not making sense, I'm sure if you RTFA it'll all come together. Well, I mean, I didn't read it, but how could it not support my point?
Oh, these indie kids today.
If they want something tangible to remember a band by, why can't they just stalk the band post-show and steal a pair of soggy undies like everybody else?
Yes, yes. When I think of indulging "guilty pleasures" on the Internet, I too cannot come up with a better example than listening to Fallout Boy on loop...
We must keep in mind that these stats are highly skewed, but useful if this defining context is taken into account. The people using flickr are: (1) fairly Internet savvy (most photographers aren't, particularly converts from film), (2) willing to publish their photos publicly (pros usually aren't). With an additional bit of info mentioned in the parent post (whether it's number of images of number of users), we could get some really good info about the camera market.
I suspect the flickr community is a fairly good representation of the digital camera population as a whole, but stats like this must be qualified in the larger scheme of things to have any value when interpreted. That's how we stay out of the "damned lies" territory.:-)
I can't understand why anyone would reply to a post they couldn't figure out (re: your "incoherent" comment).
In any case, let's assume you're right (you're not) about the "obvious" visual cue. Why do I need to make two separate click-drags if all I want to do is move the upper left corner of a window while leaving the lower right where it is?
I believe I was talking about iPhoto. Your response to my problems with it is nonsensical. The point of including default apps on the Mac is that it's supposed to be ready to go when I plug it in with no installations necessary. If the apps they include by default suck, how is that more usable than a PC? I submit that it's less usable--not only do I have to figure out how to install an app that works, I have to figure out how to uninstall an app that doesn't.
Not having to remove spyware??? I've never had to remove spyware from my home PC, or my home linux box...and my PC is actually under attack. I hate to think how the average Mac user would secure their systems against spyware if they ever gained more than 10% marketshare in the home and fell under attack in a similar way. Depending on the unpopularity of the platform seems to me to be a form of security through obscurity, which is hardly better than none at all.
You're right about one thing, though...MS blows. That's why I don't run any MS software -except- Windows on one of my two boxes, and the only reason I run that is so I can have Photoshop because, sadly, linux has nothing that can compete. (Please, don't bring up the gimp until you have actually used it to do significant post-processing akin to what one might do for showing fine art in a gallery.)
I'm always stunned by the group of people that don't recognize the value of proprietary software packaging as a benefit to business. Some of the proprietary stuff sucks, but clearly, some of it doesn't. One of the maxims of business is, has, and will always be that the customer is always right. Why can't OSS defenders see this? If a business complains or fears that OSS will be too complex, then, whether it's too complex or not, IT IS TOO COMPLEX. It's either an image problem or a usability problem, either way it's a real, live problem.
One of the things I hate about the OSS community is the I-know-better attitude they take. You don't know better, because you don't know the business of the customer as well as they do, and you probably don't know what they're expecting from a given package as well as they do either. This stuff requires a lot of work. I'm a big proponent of OSS, and I think that someday it's going to take over the world and be the primary way that software is written, but I'm always frustrated when topics like this come up and I'm reminded of how much work there is left to do. From users to developers, it's sooooo hard to contribute to OSS popularity (either as user or developer) that many of the best advocates on both sides are left behind.
As far as Macs go, for the first time in a long time I used OS X a couple of weeks ago. I was trying to help a friend use their all-in-one printer to scan in an image. My conclusion: OS X sucks...it's horrible and clumsy to use. Every time I say that, Mac defenders always tell me the same thing: it's not that it's bad or good, it's what you're used to, and you're not used to the UI.
Well, ok, let's look at that argument. Why does it take me a click and a drag and another click-drag to size a window where I want it? Every other window manager I've ever used (and I've used probably more than a dozen) if any one corner of a window is where you want it, you drag the opposite corner to where you want it and you're done. Not so...Mac decided that something so simple should cause a new user to hunt around for a few minutes trying to figure out why the window doesn't respond in the expected way. Ah ha! It's only the lower right corner that can be moved. But then that means if you want to drag the upper left, you have to resize the window using the lower right...but then you hit the bottom right corner of the screen and it's still not big enough. So the actions are ordered as well...*first* you have to drag the upper left where you want it, and the drag the lower right back where it was.
Let's talk about iLife...so back to scanning my picture. I put it in the scanner of the all-in-one and hit the scan button, it pops up a menu asking me what I'm scanning (do I want OCR, bitmap, etc?). Great, so I hit image and it scans it. On the desktop, an app automatically pops up a gallery of images and another small window with a thumbnail of the image. There's a note under the thumbnail telling me to drag and drop it into the gallery application. Oh great! Ok, this is really easy--maybe Macs are better.
So I create a new folder in the gallery app and drag the image to it. Upon releasing, however, the image doesn't show up in the gallery in that folder. Huh. So I try it again, as the thumbnail is still there giving me no indication that it actually went anywhere in the gallery app. After much frustration, I figure out that there's a magic default folder (I forget the name even now) where that application has decided all new images go before you can sort them into other folders. As I dragged it to multiple locations multiple times, I created several copies of the image in that default location. Once I discover this and enter the default location, I notice that the user who I'm helping finds this as tedious as I do--because you are forced to organize and copy in two separate steps, he hasn't gotten around to organizing a few hundred photos which just sit in the default location, never having been sorted (and not like to be).
It's not a noob question, but it does try to liken things that are not alike. Unfortunately, the human eye and cameras are different beasts that tend to frustrate nearly every attempt at comparison. This is in large part due to the fact that when most people say "the human eye" they actually mean the "eye-brain system," which is far more complicated than just the eye, which is itself already complex enough to do plenty of the frustratin'.
In any case, the issue with throwing the brain into the mix is that it does a lot of "post-processing" on the images that stream in from the eye and give us a mental picture much different from what the eye itself is actually able to pick up. Also, the eye has different kinds of vision--in the center of the field of view, in a very narrow range in fact, we see with acuity. Outside that very narrow range, our brain fills in a lot of the details that we think we see from moment to moment, but is actually not being "seen" in the same sense as what's in the center of view. (Of course, this comment will inevitably beget the philosophical discussion: what does it mean to "see," exactly?) If you doubt that your eyes only see with acuity in a fairly tight circle around the direct center of your field of vision, try this experiment: pick up a book, open it to a random page, and fixate your eyes on a word somewhere in the center. Now, see how many words you can read around that word without moving your eyes to look directly at those words. The words you can make out fall in your acute vision field. (You'll find that if you move the book farther away, you can read more words because they fall within the same angle--this works up until it gets so far away the overall level of acuity you enjoy isn't high enough to make out any of the words at all.) The rest of your field of view is in your non-central field (I'm callng it). Your peripheral vision is comprised of the part of your field of view for which your brain does not bother filling in any detail--you're only vaguely aware of it in the visual sense provided it's not moving.
What our non-central vision lacks in acuity it makes up for in motion detection. That's why hunters often say when you first spot prey in the distance that's fairly well camoflauged with its surroundings as it moves about, don't look directly at it, but look slightly to the side. That way, when it starts moving again you'll see it and you can put it in center vision again, but once it stops, look off to the side again. Stargazers often use this trick as well--if you look directly at a faint star, after a couple of seconds you'll question whether it's actually where it was just a moment before. But if you look slightly off to the side, your eyeball moves around and twitches enough that it creates apparent "motion" of the faint star you're trying to see and you can pick it up again. (Incidentally--this is the reason why our eyes in are constant motion...if you've ever tried to make your eyes exactly still you know how difficult it is to keep from twitching them constantly. It's because our brain requires that motion to keep the motion detecting parts of your eyeballs feeding the detail your visual cortex craves. You'll also find that if you are able to keep your eyes at all from twitching for an extended period, 10 or 15 seconds, you'll find that the level of detail in your non-central vision starts to fall off, sometimes even fading to black...this isn't very noticable until you start twitching again and suddenly see color and detail spring back.)
Anyway, the point is, no matter what one says about the eye in relation to a camera, someone will be bound to argue (and, in some sense, almost certainly be right). It's kind of a useless endeavor to try to get a megapixel rating for the eye, or figure out what it's dynamic range is, etc. A more fair comparison would be hooking a camera up to a computer, then periodically having the camera move slightly and snap a shot, then the computer takes it and stitches it into a composite of the entire scene comprised of s
I'm sure he said that at some point or another (or a lot of points, more likely), but my favorite bender quote is from the musical episode, "I am Bender. Please insert girder." That's not the one you're referring to, is it?
Let's not discount the major stride for personal fitness this represents. Think of how many miles I can click off on the treadmill with a pair of these babies! I'll be in the best shape of my life, and I won't even spill my beer while I'm doing it if they make the hydraulics smooth enough...
The fact is that there is a segment of the linux snob population that is willfully trying to exclude the average joes from switching away from Windows. While they themselves don't like MS, they're perfectly happy to let the MS community deal with the grandmothers and non-technical people of the world so they can stay isolated in techspeak geekbabble and not have to implore FOSS contributors to write manuals on how to double-click. They don't want to see UIs aimed at the noobs of the world. They want all the development attention focused on meeting their requirements and no one else's.
Until that segment is shunned (right now they make up part of the core), linux will always be a second fiddle OS. I've seen the sea change starting, but as long as it's not *dead easy* (as opposed to "possible") to admin a home linux box, average joe isn't going to. Right now the community is conflicted about getting what they asked for so many years back (that is, for linux to take over the world). We'll see what decision is made.
You guys are focusing on the negatives. What about the positives of this Philips plan?
When they do this, there will be a huge surge in hacker-technology that substitutes for the functionality of the device *without* the ad-view enforcement. Normal people will be compelled to become geeks to evade ads!/. will reign as the main point of interaction! Those of us currently in the know will be as gods among men!
Either that, or Philips will go out of business because everyone buys competitors' technology. So here's the plan: for us geeks to become gods among men, we have to start putting Philips' competitors out of business.
Why doesn't linux just allow proprietary drivers as transitional solutions? In other words, set up part of the codebase to contain throwaway code for proprietary code, simulators, etc. That way, until open source alternatives are available and entered into the permanent part of the codebase, people with that hardware will have a good solution in the meantime. On the other hand, since it's kept off to the side, it will be obvious to everyone contributing to development that no dependencies should be allowed on the transitional part of the codebase from the permanent part (or it, too, becomes transitional by extension).
The danger here is that vast tracts of code will suddenly become "transitional" and we'll no longer have a functioning OS if the transitional part is lopped off and thrown away. However, I get the feeling that the FOSS movement wouldn't let that happen.
I thought I'd take a line or two to educate people on the creationist "entropy argument" since it's in your post. Besides, it gives me an excuse to be exceedingly boring, which is what I enjoy doing on the Inter-webs.:-)
The standard argument I hear creationists put forth is to do with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and they love to talk about how the 2nd Law says this about entropy and that about entropy. Certainly there are implications about entropy in the 2nd Law, but these creationist arguments miss the point completely.
The 2nd Law, simply put, says that all systems tend toward a state of lowest energy. That's it. In some cases this decreases entropy, in others it increases. For example, if you put a bunch of individual oxygen atoms in a box, they'll spontaneously form O2 because that's a lower energy conformation (covalent bonding and sharing of electrons and all that). Did entropy decrease? You bet--there's half as many entities bopping around randomly, so entropy has no choice but to decrease. Pressure decreases, and so does temperature.
The same goes for far more complex molecules as well, such as chlorophyll. Put the constituent parts in a beaker, and it will spontaneously form (which scientists have successfully done). And DNA (which scientists have not yet successfully done).
Why is DNA so difficult? Because while the 2nd Law provides that all things tend to the state of lowest energy, it doesn't say anything about reaction pathways--if no pathway is present, the reaction won't happen. Look at a candle and consider: why doesn't the wick burn by itself spontaneously? Well, it does--but not until the pathway that enables that reaction (an ignition source) is provided.
I don't care if you do park way out. Don't take up two spots. It's inconsiderate and ignorant. I trade my cars every two or three years for the latest greatest, so I'm always driving a fairly new vehicle, and I'm too lazy to walk so I look for the best parking spot I can find. Most new cars these days have taken care of the dings possible in the front / rear bumper for parallel parking, and some even guard the sides (high-end mercedes and saturns), but for the most part I expect people to be normal human beings, use one spot, park well, and don't ding the car next to you.
Having said that, if I end up having to park next to a fool that hasn't figured out how to behave in civilized society, I'm happy to snap his picture and have him pay for any damage he does. Cops also love to ticket people like this if they were outside the lines provided all the work has been done for them by you in the way of providing evidence (in addition to the ticket for the ding).
I would totally agree with you were it not for the fact that your average cell phone and pocket camera these days has Carl Zeiss glass in it. What you say is true, though, if the glass can't pass it, the chip doesn't matter...like in the case of the disposables, for instance, that use a polished plastic sheet as a lens.
Not to nitpick, but you got the telomere thing completely wrong. The presence of telomeres in cellular DNA is what allows the process of cellular reproduction to continue...in other words, telomere loss does not cause cancer, it prevents it. In fact, it has been observed that cancerous cells possess a gene that produces telomerase, an enzyme that prevents a cell from expending a "telomere bead" during each reproduction (a "telomere bead" is the telomere-containing unit that drops off in a normal cell reproduction--when there are no more telomere beads left, the cell can no longer reproduce). It is the presence of telomerase that causes a cell to be effectively immortal, reproducing constantly without limit, hence the cancerous tumor.
The key to immortality (at least, this week) is understanding how to introduce telomerase into cells to prevent aging without causing uncontrolled cancerous reproduction of the cell. And then we just have to cure the remaining diseases. And prevent accidental deaths. Other than that, we're virtually immortal already.
Of course, none of what I'm saying impacts the validity of your overall point one bit--as we cure diseases, people will live longer and the incidence of death due to other diseases will rise. This does not constitute an "other-disease" epidemic. Rises in death rates due to particular diseases or families of disease should be ignored provided that they occur while overall life expectancy increases.
(I've often thought it would be instructive to graph the rising number of deaths due to other diseases as measles, mumps, flu, rubella, and polio were eradicated. After all, the people that would have fallen to those diseases ended up dying of something else eventually.)
Us photographers have already had this argument dozens of times over dSLR vs. pocket camera (and a phone camera is the ultimate pocket camera). The problem with non-dSLRs is not the MP, nor is it necessarily the optics. The limiting factor is the chip size. No tiny camera phone is going to achieve a low-noise image because the photosites on the sensor are packed so close together. These cameras will never be serious for picture taking until technology provides a high-dynamic range, noise-free image from a tiny sensor.
Having said that, the best camera is the one you have with you. What do I use my camera phone for? When I park in a parking lot next to a jerk (someone who's askew in their spot, over the line, etc), I snap a picture that includes their license plate, make/model, and the horribleness of their parking job. If there's a ding in my door when I get back, they're busted! If I ever get caught snapping by the jerk, I'll just tell him I run a website called inconsideratebuttholes.com and I'm thinking of making him the feature of the day.
(I've often thought about leaving such parkers a note--something along the lines of, "Your parking job is inconsiderate and I hope you'll think about this next time you leave the house"--using nothing, of course, but my ignition key and their hood.)
...anyone should be able to read a headline and quickly get an idea of what the story's about. Much better to have some snarky news editor misleading us to get us to read their stupid story.
I, for one, welcome "boring, straightforward" news headlines. After all, it's news. Not commentary, not opinion. If I see a newspaper section marked "Scene" I'm not likely to know what it's about.
It's not self-incrimination to return company property to the company, as they own everything on the laptop anyway.
However...this seems like an easy slam dunk case to me. The only way they can prove he broke any law is by proving that he deleted something that would have incriminated him. If I were him, I would say the following: "I only deleted files that did not violate the law to delete, as there were no files on the hard disk that violated the law in letter nor in spirit."
Innocent until proven guilty--they not only have to show I deleted files, but that the files I deleted were illegal to delete. The only way they can do that is to have knowledge of the files before they got deleted, which they do not have.
As an analog, consider document shredding. Companies shred documents all the time. If I get brought up on destroying evidence and the prosecutor has no idea what evidence I destroyed, I can simply say, um...no, none of the docs I shredded would have served here to incriminate me in any crime. They were personal love notes to my wife that I kept with me at my desk and things like that, things I no longer wanted. Please feel free to prove otherwise.
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I call BS! Who, specifically, died from taping themselves in their house? The oft-cited problem with that suggestion is that it doesn't make houses airtight, so it wouldn't asphyxiate anyone, nor would it protect them from chemical weapons.
Actaully...you're not doing any work if you're not moving. At least, no "work" as far as physics is concerned. Work = delta Energy = F*d*cos(theta)
You only think this way because you're not looking hard enough to find out how it's our fault. It's hard to believe it's nearly 2007 and people like you still haven't figured out that every ecological problem in the world is our fault. Or, more specifically, yours and mine. Oh, you say you just wanted to sit down and enjoy an episode of Battlestar Galactica on DVD? Well thanks for wrecking the Amazon and feeding radium to starving Indian children you fascist! You just bought your girlfriend a dozen roses? Oh how nice. Did you realize those roses were shipped in a vehicle that burned fuel from the Middle East that funds oil sheiks that funded terrorism that killed my neighbors grandmother in Israel? Real nice, you Nazi. I hope your girlfriend thinks those flowers were worth having a poor old woman's head stomped in. If it sounds like I'm not making sense, I'm sure if you RTFA it'll all come together. Well, I mean, I didn't read it, but how could it not support my point?
Anyone who spends any substantial amount of time there will get dizzy from all the spinning.
Doesn't the president pretty much have martial law power as it is already? What did this bill change, exactly?
Yea, thirty years would never have been allowed to elapse between photo shoots if it were, say, a naked lady.
Oh, these indie kids today. If they want something tangible to remember a band by, why can't they just stalk the band post-show and steal a pair of soggy undies like everybody else?
Yes, yes. When I think of indulging "guilty pleasures" on the Internet, I too cannot come up with a better example than listening to Fallout Boy on loop...
We must keep in mind that these stats are highly skewed, but useful if this defining context is taken into account. The people using flickr are: (1) fairly Internet savvy (most photographers aren't, particularly converts from film), (2) willing to publish their photos publicly (pros usually aren't). With an additional bit of info mentioned in the parent post (whether it's number of images of number of users), we could get some really good info about the camera market.
:-)
I suspect the flickr community is a fairly good representation of the digital camera population as a whole, but stats like this must be qualified in the larger scheme of things to have any value when interpreted. That's how we stay out of the "damned lies" territory.
I can't understand why anyone would reply to a post they couldn't figure out (re: your "incoherent" comment).
In any case, let's assume you're right (you're not) about the "obvious" visual cue. Why do I need to make two separate click-drags if all I want to do is move the upper left corner of a window while leaving the lower right where it is?
I believe I was talking about iPhoto. Your response to my problems with it is nonsensical. The point of including default apps on the Mac is that it's supposed to be ready to go when I plug it in with no installations necessary. If the apps they include by default suck, how is that more usable than a PC? I submit that it's less usable--not only do I have to figure out how to install an app that works, I have to figure out how to uninstall an app that doesn't.
Not having to remove spyware??? I've never had to remove spyware from my home PC, or my home linux box...and my PC is actually under attack. I hate to think how the average Mac user would secure their systems against spyware if they ever gained more than 10% marketshare in the home and fell under attack in a similar way. Depending on the unpopularity of the platform seems to me to be a form of security through obscurity, which is hardly better than none at all.
You're right about one thing, though...MS blows. That's why I don't run any MS software -except- Windows on one of my two boxes, and the only reason I run that is so I can have Photoshop because, sadly, linux has nothing that can compete. (Please, don't bring up the gimp until you have actually used it to do significant post-processing akin to what one might do for showing fine art in a gallery.)
I couldn't disagree more. You can have the best application in the world. If no one is using it, it amounts exactly to a pile of doggie doo.
I'm always stunned by the group of people that don't recognize the value of proprietary software packaging as a benefit to business. Some of the proprietary stuff sucks, but clearly, some of it doesn't. One of the maxims of business is, has, and will always be that the customer is always right. Why can't OSS defenders see this? If a business complains or fears that OSS will be too complex, then, whether it's too complex or not, IT IS TOO COMPLEX. It's either an image problem or a usability problem, either way it's a real, live problem.
One of the things I hate about the OSS community is the I-know-better attitude they take. You don't know better, because you don't know the business of the customer as well as they do, and you probably don't know what they're expecting from a given package as well as they do either. This stuff requires a lot of work. I'm a big proponent of OSS, and I think that someday it's going to take over the world and be the primary way that software is written, but I'm always frustrated when topics like this come up and I'm reminded of how much work there is left to do. From users to developers, it's sooooo hard to contribute to OSS popularity (either as user or developer) that many of the best advocates on both sides are left behind.
As far as Macs go, for the first time in a long time I used OS X a couple of weeks ago. I was trying to help a friend use their all-in-one printer to scan in an image. My conclusion: OS X sucks...it's horrible and clumsy to use. Every time I say that, Mac defenders always tell me the same thing: it's not that it's bad or good, it's what you're used to, and you're not used to the UI.
Well, ok, let's look at that argument. Why does it take me a click and a drag and another click-drag to size a window where I want it? Every other window manager I've ever used (and I've used probably more than a dozen) if any one corner of a window is where you want it, you drag the opposite corner to where you want it and you're done. Not so...Mac decided that something so simple should cause a new user to hunt around for a few minutes trying to figure out why the window doesn't respond in the expected way. Ah ha! It's only the lower right corner that can be moved. But then that means if you want to drag the upper left, you have to resize the window using the lower right...but then you hit the bottom right corner of the screen and it's still not big enough. So the actions are ordered as well...*first* you have to drag the upper left where you want it, and the drag the lower right back where it was.
Let's talk about iLife...so back to scanning my picture. I put it in the scanner of the all-in-one and hit the scan button, it pops up a menu asking me what I'm scanning (do I want OCR, bitmap, etc?). Great, so I hit image and it scans it. On the desktop, an app automatically pops up a gallery of images and another small window with a thumbnail of the image. There's a note under the thumbnail telling me to drag and drop it into the gallery application. Oh great! Ok, this is really easy--maybe Macs are better.
So I create a new folder in the gallery app and drag the image to it. Upon releasing, however, the image doesn't show up in the gallery in that folder. Huh. So I try it again, as the thumbnail is still there giving me no indication that it actually went anywhere in the gallery app. After much frustration, I figure out that there's a magic default folder (I forget the name even now) where that application has decided all new images go before you can sort them into other folders. As I dragged it to multiple locations multiple times, I created several copies of the image in that default location. Once I discover this and enter the default location, I notice that the user who I'm helping finds this as tedious as I do--because you are forced to organize and copy in two separate steps, he hasn't gotten around to organizing a few hundred photos which just sit in the default location, never having been sorted (and not like to be).
After hunting through that
It's not a noob question, but it does try to liken things that are not alike. Unfortunately, the human eye and cameras are different beasts that tend to frustrate nearly every attempt at comparison. This is in large part due to the fact that when most people say "the human eye" they actually mean the "eye-brain system," which is far more complicated than just the eye, which is itself already complex enough to do plenty of the frustratin'.
In any case, the issue with throwing the brain into the mix is that it does a lot of "post-processing" on the images that stream in from the eye and give us a mental picture much different from what the eye itself is actually able to pick up. Also, the eye has different kinds of vision--in the center of the field of view, in a very narrow range in fact, we see with acuity. Outside that very narrow range, our brain fills in a lot of the details that we think we see from moment to moment, but is actually not being "seen" in the same sense as what's in the center of view. (Of course, this comment will inevitably beget the philosophical discussion: what does it mean to "see," exactly?) If you doubt that your eyes only see with acuity in a fairly tight circle around the direct center of your field of vision, try this experiment: pick up a book, open it to a random page, and fixate your eyes on a word somewhere in the center. Now, see how many words you can read around that word without moving your eyes to look directly at those words. The words you can make out fall in your acute vision field. (You'll find that if you move the book farther away, you can read more words because they fall within the same angle--this works up until it gets so far away the overall level of acuity you enjoy isn't high enough to make out any of the words at all.) The rest of your field of view is in your non-central field (I'm callng it). Your peripheral vision is comprised of the part of your field of view for which your brain does not bother filling in any detail--you're only vaguely aware of it in the visual sense provided it's not moving.
What our non-central vision lacks in acuity it makes up for in motion detection. That's why hunters often say when you first spot prey in the distance that's fairly well camoflauged with its surroundings as it moves about, don't look directly at it, but look slightly to the side. That way, when it starts moving again you'll see it and you can put it in center vision again, but once it stops, look off to the side again. Stargazers often use this trick as well--if you look directly at a faint star, after a couple of seconds you'll question whether it's actually where it was just a moment before. But if you look slightly off to the side, your eyeball moves around and twitches enough that it creates apparent "motion" of the faint star you're trying to see and you can pick it up again. (Incidentally--this is the reason why our eyes in are constant motion...if you've ever tried to make your eyes exactly still you know how difficult it is to keep from twitching them constantly. It's because our brain requires that motion to keep the motion detecting parts of your eyeballs feeding the detail your visual cortex craves. You'll also find that if you are able to keep your eyes at all from twitching for an extended period, 10 or 15 seconds, you'll find that the level of detail in your non-central vision starts to fall off, sometimes even fading to black...this isn't very noticable until you start twitching again and suddenly see color and detail spring back.)
Anyway, the point is, no matter what one says about the eye in relation to a camera, someone will be bound to argue (and, in some sense, almost certainly be right). It's kind of a useless endeavor to try to get a megapixel rating for the eye, or figure out what it's dynamic range is, etc. A more fair comparison would be hooking a camera up to a computer, then periodically having the camera move slightly and snap a shot, then the computer takes it and stitches it into a composite of the entire scene comprised of s
I'm sure he said that at some point or another (or a lot of points, more likely), but my favorite bender quote is from the musical episode, "I am Bender. Please insert girder." That's not the one you're referring to, is it?
Let's not discount the major stride for personal fitness this represents. Think of how many miles I can click off on the treadmill with a pair of these babies! I'll be in the best shape of my life, and I won't even spill my beer while I'm doing it if they make the hydraulics smooth enough...
The fact is that there is a segment of the linux snob population that is willfully trying to exclude the average joes from switching away from Windows. While they themselves don't like MS, they're perfectly happy to let the MS community deal with the grandmothers and non-technical people of the world so they can stay isolated in techspeak geekbabble and not have to implore FOSS contributors to write manuals on how to double-click. They don't want to see UIs aimed at the noobs of the world. They want all the development attention focused on meeting their requirements and no one else's.
Until that segment is shunned (right now they make up part of the core), linux will always be a second fiddle OS. I've seen the sea change starting, but as long as it's not *dead easy* (as opposed to "possible") to admin a home linux box, average joe isn't going to. Right now the community is conflicted about getting what they asked for so many years back (that is, for linux to take over the world). We'll see what decision is made.
You guys are focusing on the negatives. What about the positives of this Philips plan?
/. will reign as the main point of interaction! Those of us currently in the know will be as gods among men!
When they do this, there will be a huge surge in hacker-technology that substitutes for the functionality of the device *without* the ad-view enforcement. Normal people will be compelled to become geeks to evade ads!
Either that, or Philips will go out of business because everyone buys competitors' technology. So here's the plan: for us geeks to become gods among men, we have to start putting Philips' competitors out of business.
Ready...?
Go!
Why doesn't linux just allow proprietary drivers as transitional solutions? In other words, set up part of the codebase to contain throwaway code for proprietary code, simulators, etc. That way, until open source alternatives are available and entered into the permanent part of the codebase, people with that hardware will have a good solution in the meantime. On the other hand, since it's kept off to the side, it will be obvious to everyone contributing to development that no dependencies should be allowed on the transitional part of the codebase from the permanent part (or it, too, becomes transitional by extension).
The danger here is that vast tracts of code will suddenly become "transitional" and we'll no longer have a functioning OS if the transitional part is lopped off and thrown away. However, I get the feeling that the FOSS movement wouldn't let that happen.
I thought I'd take a line or two to educate people on the creationist "entropy argument" since it's in your post. Besides, it gives me an excuse to be exceedingly boring, which is what I enjoy doing on the Inter-webs. :-)
The standard argument I hear creationists put forth is to do with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and they love to talk about how the 2nd Law says this about entropy and that about entropy. Certainly there are implications about entropy in the 2nd Law, but these creationist arguments miss the point completely.
The 2nd Law, simply put, says that all systems tend toward a state of lowest energy. That's it. In some cases this decreases entropy, in others it increases. For example, if you put a bunch of individual oxygen atoms in a box, they'll spontaneously form O2 because that's a lower energy conformation (covalent bonding and sharing of electrons and all that). Did entropy decrease? You bet--there's half as many entities bopping around randomly, so entropy has no choice but to decrease. Pressure decreases, and so does temperature.
The same goes for far more complex molecules as well, such as chlorophyll. Put the constituent parts in a beaker, and it will spontaneously form (which scientists have successfully done). And DNA (which scientists have not yet successfully done).
Why is DNA so difficult? Because while the 2nd Law provides that all things tend to the state of lowest energy, it doesn't say anything about reaction pathways--if no pathway is present, the reaction won't happen. Look at a candle and consider: why doesn't the wick burn by itself spontaneously? Well, it does--but not until the pathway that enables that reaction (an ignition source) is provided.
I don't care if you do park way out. Don't take up two spots. It's inconsiderate and ignorant. I trade my cars every two or three years for the latest greatest, so I'm always driving a fairly new vehicle, and I'm too lazy to walk so I look for the best parking spot I can find. Most new cars these days have taken care of the dings possible in the front / rear bumper for parallel parking, and some even guard the sides (high-end mercedes and saturns), but for the most part I expect people to be normal human beings, use one spot, park well, and don't ding the car next to you.
Having said that, if I end up having to park next to a fool that hasn't figured out how to behave in civilized society, I'm happy to snap his picture and have him pay for any damage he does. Cops also love to ticket people like this if they were outside the lines provided all the work has been done for them by you in the way of providing evidence (in addition to the ticket for the ding).
I would totally agree with you were it not for the fact that your average cell phone and pocket camera these days has Carl Zeiss glass in it. What you say is true, though, if the glass can't pass it, the chip doesn't matter...like in the case of the disposables, for instance, that use a polished plastic sheet as a lens.
Not to nitpick, but you got the telomere thing completely wrong. The presence of telomeres in cellular DNA is what allows the process of cellular reproduction to continue...in other words, telomere loss does not cause cancer, it prevents it. In fact, it has been observed that cancerous cells possess a gene that produces telomerase, an enzyme that prevents a cell from expending a "telomere bead" during each reproduction (a "telomere bead" is the telomere-containing unit that drops off in a normal cell reproduction--when there are no more telomere beads left, the cell can no longer reproduce). It is the presence of telomerase that causes a cell to be effectively immortal, reproducing constantly without limit, hence the cancerous tumor.
The key to immortality (at least, this week) is understanding how to introduce telomerase into cells to prevent aging without causing uncontrolled cancerous reproduction of the cell. And then we just have to cure the remaining diseases. And prevent accidental deaths. Other than that, we're virtually immortal already.
Of course, none of what I'm saying impacts the validity of your overall point one bit--as we cure diseases, people will live longer and the incidence of death due to other diseases will rise. This does not constitute an "other-disease" epidemic. Rises in death rates due to particular diseases or families of disease should be ignored provided that they occur while overall life expectancy increases.
(I've often thought it would be instructive to graph the rising number of deaths due to other diseases as measles, mumps, flu, rubella, and polio were eradicated. After all, the people that would have fallen to those diseases ended up dying of something else eventually.)
Us photographers have already had this argument dozens of times over dSLR vs. pocket camera (and a phone camera is the ultimate pocket camera). The problem with non-dSLRs is not the MP, nor is it necessarily the optics. The limiting factor is the chip size. No tiny camera phone is going to achieve a low-noise image because the photosites on the sensor are packed so close together. These cameras will never be serious for picture taking until technology provides a high-dynamic range, noise-free image from a tiny sensor.
Having said that, the best camera is the one you have with you. What do I use my camera phone for? When I park in a parking lot next to a jerk (someone who's askew in their spot, over the line, etc), I snap a picture that includes their license plate, make/model, and the horribleness of their parking job. If there's a ding in my door when I get back, they're busted! If I ever get caught snapping by the jerk, I'll just tell him I run a website called inconsideratebuttholes.com and I'm thinking of making him the feature of the day.
(I've often thought about leaving such parkers a note--something along the lines of, "Your parking job is inconsiderate and I hope you'll think about this next time you leave the house"--using nothing, of course, but my ignition key and their hood.)
...anyone should be able to read a headline and quickly get an idea of what the story's about. Much better to have some snarky news editor misleading us to get us to read their stupid story.
I, for one, welcome "boring, straightforward" news headlines. After all, it's news. Not commentary, not opinion. If I see a newspaper section marked "Scene" I'm not likely to know what it's about.
It's not self-incrimination to return company property to the company, as they own everything on the laptop anyway.
However...this seems like an easy slam dunk case to me. The only way they can prove he broke any law is by proving that he deleted something that would have incriminated him. If I were him, I would say the following: "I only deleted files that did not violate the law to delete, as there were no files on the hard disk that violated the law in letter nor in spirit."
Innocent until proven guilty--they not only have to show I deleted files, but that the files I deleted were illegal to delete. The only way they can do that is to have knowledge of the files before they got deleted, which they do not have.
As an analog, consider document shredding. Companies shred documents all the time. If I get brought up on destroying evidence and the prosecutor has no idea what evidence I destroyed, I can simply say, um...no, none of the docs I shredded would have served here to incriminate me in any crime. They were personal love notes to my wife that I kept with me at my desk and things like that, things I no longer wanted. Please feel free to prove otherwise.