Their innovation is being online, and are rather good at it.
There are arguments both ways on that. I've bought lots of books and CDs from Amazon (and still do buy a fair number of CDs), but Amazon's lockout policy with ebooks for owners of non-Kindle reader devices is just silly. I'm just one individual, and if Amazon have missed out on a few sales to me just because I happen to prefer a Sony reader, multiply that number by $BIGNUM and it. will end up as a sizeable chunk of money they have failed to grab.
Ditto their policy with music. Amazon offers a good service in allowing the buyer to listen to tracks before putting any money down. But since I have now built myself a decent music box, I prefer not to store CDs if I don't have to, so their silly policy of not selling recordings in lossless format often leads me to look elsewhere.
Even iTunes offers lossless recordings (it's easy to convert from.m4a to FLAC), though the selection of recordings is fairly limited.
I seriously think Glass is going to change the way people operate.
You might be right. We may see an unprecedented surge of violence against nerds (or geeks, if you prefer) from people who see these non-corrective glasses as an intrusion on their privacy.
By way of an example, I suggest wearing that device in a public urinal. Bring someone along with you to count the number of seconds before the big guy at the next stall gets the wrong idea and beats the living crap out of you.
I have worked for a small company where my boss was the man who scrubbed the toilets (and without complaint). His "take" on it was that he was paying his staff for expertise he didn't have, so he got on with all of the other things that needed to be done in the interests of getting the most value for his money.
Unfortunately, they've really left it too late for the company to restructure and reorient in the way that the more far-sighted Fujifilm did over a decade ago
Incidentally, Kodak never really hit my buttons with their colour films to the extent that Agfachrome (RIP 1978) and Fuji did. Agfa was never quite the same after it adopted Kodak's process, but Fuji film (which still seems to be pretty commonly available, at least for now) rocks.
Well, setting aside the various quirks of the two technologies, it can be argued that digital has not quite caught up with film when it comes to resolution...
Perhaps not any more. When I was a teenager, a 60x60 mm format Rolleiflex (or, if you were wealthy, a Hasselblad) was regarded as a "medium-format" camera, and if you wanted really high resolution in your final prints, it wasn't uncommon to use 5x4" or even 8x10" cameras with low-speed film in order to get the finest size of grain in proportion to that on the final print.
But even the most committed troglodyte has to admit those machines (and all their associated paraphernalia) were pretty fucking cumbersome. For the majority of people who used 35mm format cameras, resolution in even a 5x4" print is pretty poor by comparison with what is available now. (However, if you care about these things, there is the trade-off against colour that I mentioned in an earler post).
In any case, it isn't that hard to set up your own darkroom. When I was a teenager, I used a bathroom in my parents' house, with the windows blanked out.
The whole process isn't even that expensive, so long as you don't mind improvising a bit for an enlarger. In my case, I had an old 1940s enlarger that was pretty basic, but its imperfections led to some great effects that I wouldn't have got from more sophisticated or modern models.
I rarely made colour negatives, though; if I ever wanted a colour print, I used to use Cibachrome (now Ilfochrome) paper to make prints from colour transparencies. It involved a bit of work, but I don't believe I have ever seen such vibrant, almost luminous colour in a digital print.
It's a step in the right direction to actually have a Bill of Rights. A quick check at Wikipedia shows European countries being (largely) well-represented, but there are some conspicuous absences. It isn't good enough to say that the existing legal system works "well enough" without one.
...that we Brits cling to when we want to feel better about the end of empire and the decline of our military and industrial might.
...whereas anyone who has read Oscar Wilde will know that the reason why the sun never set on the British Empire was because God couldn't trust an Englishman in the dark.
Remember, winning means everything. It's not about getting more voters. It's about getting more of YOUR voters to vote
Hey, you have a choice. Here in Australia, voting is compulsory.
While I am actually in favour of that (on balance, at least, given that there are valid arguments both ways), it skews the electoral system to having to devote most effort to chasing uncommitted (i.e. swinging) voters. IMO, these individuals should be the least eligible to be on the electoral roll.
However, it would be too radical (not to mention ironic) to disqualify sections of the electorate on the basis of stupidity or lack of values.
Yes. but notice the rider "to fight terrorism". If the NSA has to conduct surveillance on 300 million people to find one or two terrorists, then it is either under-resourced or it is fishing and profiling on a massive scale. If that survey had been phrased a bit more honestly, we should expect a totally different statistic.
Well said. And I expect that since Snowden has apparently "gone missing" in Hong Kong, it wouldn't surprise me much to find out that the Obama administration has continued Bush's fine tradition of extra-legal rendition so he can be spirited off to Guantanamo or to some other undisclosed prison in Eastern Europe.
For those posters in this thread who have been baying for Snowden's blood, I would be interested to hear of any morally justifiable reason for security services to act in such a reprehensible manner.
As for your President, I once entertained high hopes for his conduct (before his election, and on the principle that he couldn't be much worse than Bush). So much for that. But at least I didn't have high expectations, given that Obama was (a) a very wealthy lawyer and (b) a politician.
Heh. Not long after I arrived in Australia (1987), it was common to be able to buy a bottle of Wynn's Coonawarra Hermitage for $2.50. Then some asswipe just had to write it up in a newspaper review, and the price multiplied by a factor of ten almost overnight.
So never mind the lawyers, first let's kill all the journalists...
It does indeed make sense, and there are many who are striving to construct an objective set of criteria for evaluating wines.
However, even this can be foiled by expectations. There have been several instances where researchers have found that supposedly knowledgeable judges tasting wines in a blind (as in blindfolded) context have been shown to be unable to distinguish white wines from red.
Objectively, that might stand to reason, given that both are likely to carry a similar array of organic compounds.
From a chemist's point of view, it might be more informative to subject the wine to some form chromatographic or other chemical analysis. This, at least would have the advantage of cutting out all the pretentious bullshit associated with wine criticism.
The good news is that there are a few Masters of Wine (example here) who are currently attempting to do just that.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA says nothing about 802.11 (aka Wi-Fi) - it seems that was an invention of the submitter.
No, it was in the title of the article I originally linked to. A few things got lost/changed in the editing process.
I'd rather have a glass that displays an internet meme appropriate to my level of intoxication.
My life's obviously a lot simpler than yours. I just want a glass that is always full. :)
Their innovation is being online, and are rather good at it.
There are arguments both ways on that. I've bought lots of books and CDs from Amazon (and still do buy a fair number of CDs), but Amazon's lockout policy with ebooks for owners of non-Kindle reader devices is just silly. I'm just one individual, and if Amazon have missed out on a few sales to me just because I happen to prefer a Sony reader, multiply that number by $BIGNUM and it. will end up as a sizeable chunk of money they have failed to grab.
.m4a to FLAC), though the selection of recordings is fairly limited.
Ditto their policy with music. Amazon offers a good service in allowing the buyer to listen to tracks before putting any money down. But since I have now built myself a decent music box, I prefer not to store CDs if I don't have to, so their silly policy of not selling recordings in lossless format often leads me to look elsewhere.
Even iTunes offers lossless recordings (it's easy to convert from
I seriously think Glass is going to change the way people operate.
You might be right. We may see an unprecedented surge of violence against nerds (or geeks, if you prefer) from people who see these non-corrective glasses as an intrusion on their privacy.
By way of an example, I suggest wearing that device in a public urinal. Bring someone along with you to count the number of seconds before the big guy at the next stall gets the wrong idea and beats the living crap out of you.
In our apartment building in the late 1970's there was only one telephone.
I lived in buildings in London as recently as the late '80s where that was the case.
No really, I reserve my black heliocopters for people who actually threaten me, or for fast Domino's delivery.
Use the right tool for the job. Heliocopters are better for flying into the sun.
I have worked for a small company where my boss was the man who scrubbed the toilets (and without complaint). His "take" on it was that he was paying his staff for expertise he didn't have, so he got on with all of the other things that needed to be done in the interests of getting the most value for his money.
An unusually enlightened attitude, I might say...
and the Eloi will slowly start to fade out of existance [sic].
Better than being eaten.
So the question is do they send a new request every three months when their warrant renews
I think the whole point is that the NSA is acting extra-legally, so there is no warrant - since that would involve the judiciary.
Unfortunately, they've really left it too late for the company to restructure and reorient in the way that the more far-sighted Fujifilm did over a decade ago
Incidentally, Kodak never really hit my buttons with their colour films to the extent that Agfachrome (RIP 1978) and Fuji did. Agfa was never quite the same after it adopted Kodak's process, but Fuji film (which still seems to be pretty commonly available, at least for now) rocks.
Well, setting aside the various quirks of the two technologies, it can be argued that digital has not quite caught up with film when it comes to resolution...
Perhaps not any more. When I was a teenager, a 60x60 mm format Rolleiflex (or, if you were wealthy, a Hasselblad) was regarded as a "medium-format" camera, and if you wanted really high resolution in your final prints, it wasn't uncommon to use 5x4" or even 8x10" cameras with low-speed film in order to get the finest size of grain in proportion to that on the final print.
But even the most committed troglodyte has to admit those machines (and all their associated paraphernalia) were pretty fucking cumbersome. For the majority of people who used 35mm format cameras, resolution in even a 5x4" print is pretty poor by comparison with what is available now. (However, if you care about these things, there is the trade-off against colour that I mentioned in an earler post).
In any case, it isn't that hard to set up your own darkroom. When I was a teenager, I used a bathroom in my parents' house, with the windows blanked out.
The whole process isn't even that expensive, so long as you don't mind improvising a bit for an enlarger. In my case, I had an old 1940s enlarger that was pretty basic, but its imperfections led to some great effects that I wouldn't have got from more sophisticated or modern models.
I rarely made colour negatives, though; if I ever wanted a colour print, I used to use Cibachrome (now Ilfochrome) paper to make prints from colour transparencies. It involved a bit of work, but I don't believe I have ever seen such vibrant, almost luminous colour in a digital print.
It's a step in the right direction to actually have a Bill of Rights. A quick check at Wikipedia shows European countries being (largely) well-represented, but there are some conspicuous absences. It isn't good enough to say that the existing legal system works "well enough" without one.
It sounds confusingly like the Battle of Baklava, but everybody fights over the last piece.
On the other hand, it might be entertaining to watch a bank robbery where the participants wear baklava. A sticky business...
...that we Brits cling to when we want to feel better about the end of empire and the decline of our military and industrial might.
...whereas anyone who has read Oscar Wilde will know that the reason why the sun never set on the British Empire was because God couldn't trust an Englishman in the dark.
You would need to show that the sampling was biased...
No. You just have to ask the question carefully so that you get the answer you want.
Looks like they did just that.
If its so necessary for terrorism, how did the Boston bombing happen then?
A cynical answer (who knows if it's accurate?) might be that the NSA set it up themselves in the hope of getting an increased budget.
Remember, winning means everything. It's not about getting more voters. It's about getting more of YOUR voters to vote
Hey, you have a choice. Here in Australia, voting is compulsory.
:P
While I am actually in favour of that (on balance, at least, given that there are valid arguments both ways), it skews the electoral system to having to devote most effort to chasing uncommitted (i.e. swinging) voters. IMO, these individuals should be the least eligible to be on the electoral roll.
However, it would be too radical (not to mention ironic) to disqualify sections of the electorate on the basis of stupidity or lack of values.
Oh, it's true...
Yes. but notice the rider "to fight terrorism". If the NSA has to conduct surveillance on 300 million people to find one or two terrorists, then it is either under-resourced or it is fishing and profiling on a massive scale. If that survey had been phrased a bit more honestly, we should expect a totally different statistic.
Citation please.
Look it up for yourself, you lazy sod.
There have been several variants on the survey, some using blindfolds, while others used dyes to colour white wines red.
One removes the appearance of the wine from the equation, while the other brings out the influence of the judge's expectations.
Well said. And I expect that since Snowden has apparently "gone missing" in Hong Kong, it wouldn't surprise me much to find out that the Obama administration has continued Bush's fine tradition of extra-legal rendition so he can be spirited off to Guantanamo or to some other undisclosed prison in Eastern Europe.
For those posters in this thread who have been baying for Snowden's blood, I would be interested to hear of any morally justifiable reason for security services to act in such a reprehensible manner.
As for your President, I once entertained high hopes for his conduct (before his election, and on the principle that he couldn't be much worse than Bush). So much for that. But at least I didn't have high expectations, given that Obama was (a) a very wealthy lawyer and (b) a politician.
Heh. Not long after I arrived in Australia (1987), it was common to be able to buy a bottle of Wynn's Coonawarra Hermitage for $2.50. Then some asswipe just had to write it up in a newspaper review, and the price multiplied by a factor of ten almost overnight.
So never mind the lawyers, first let's kill all the journalists...
At least there's one benefit from the current trend of the use of screw-tops. [I refuse to call them Stelvin closures: a screw-top is a screw-top.]
Your wine might be screwed, but it will never be corked.
...simplicity in wine labelling:
"A fine-bodied Cabernet Sauvignon, with rich chocolate and blackberry notes. Will get you shitfaced."
It does indeed make sense, and there are many who are striving to construct an objective set of criteria for evaluating wines.
However, even this can be foiled by expectations. There have been several instances where researchers have found that supposedly knowledgeable judges tasting wines in a blind (as in blindfolded) context have been shown to be unable to distinguish white wines from red.
Objectively, that might stand to reason, given that both are likely to carry a similar array of organic compounds.
From a chemist's point of view, it might be more informative to subject the wine to some form chromatographic or other chemical analysis. This, at least would have the advantage of cutting out all the pretentious bullshit associated with wine criticism.
The good news is that there are a few Masters of Wine (example here) who are currently attempting to do just that.