This photo is actually of comparable quality to what you'd get from NASA, given the same conditions under which it was taken under.
Bear in mind that the photo is being taken through many, many miles of air, during the daytime, and the daytime heat causes all kinds of instabilities in the air that will show up as waviness in the image (the same phenomenon causes stars to twinkle at night). Finding steady air at night is hard enough, but getting images this clear during the day is remarkable, even taking the quick shutter speed into account.
Also bear in mind that the Sun is only about 30 arcminutes across as seen from the Earth, meaning that the Shuttle silhouette itself is at most just a very few arcseconds in size. To put it in perspective, it's on the order of getting a clear photo of the text "In God We Trust" on a dime from the other end of a (US) football field while the dime is moving at 4 feet or so per second.
It's a real photo, and it's not terribly difficult to take such photos if you have a good camera, a good telescope (Takahashi is among the best), and most importantly a good equatorial mount for the scope. For solar photos like this, add a good broadband solar filter into the mix.
Lock the scope onto the Sun, set the camera to capture frames as fast as possible, and then throw out everything that comes out crappy. There were two really good frames of the Atlantis shown, but there are no telling how many awful-looking ones were discarded. People do this kind of stuff all the time, but it just doesn't get publicized.
No, the United States does not have a "loser pays" system, and it doesn't follow that a lawyer didn't do a good job and is not deserving of payment just because he lost the case.
Yes, I perceive this to be a problem too - if you're continuing to bring in millions of dollars per year in royalties and you (and your children) are guaranteed that gravy train for the rest of your life, it takes away a lot of the incentive to get off your butt and do more.
Copyright is a reasonable idea, but the implementation is horribly, horribly broken.
Are you intending to argue that listening to music that was produced by someone else (at a cost to the producer) is an inherent natural right of human beings and therefore downloading it (without compensation to the producer) constitutes no moral or ethical injustice?
I will.
The way it's supposed to work (in the US, anyway) is that when someone creates a work, it's owned by society. However, understanding that people need to eat, they're given an exclusive right to distribute what they create for a *limited* time, the idea being that it will encourage them to keep creating new works, but that the work will revert back to society where it will enrich the cultural pool. Problem is, the whole concept of "limited time" is now one of a mere technicality, as copyright terms extend well beyond the length of the author's lifetime. Apparently, as long as Congress doesn't define the term of copyright as "forever", it's not considered to be at odds with the intent of the Constitution. This is ridiculous.
Distributing a tune recorded by Britney Spears should probably be considered copyright infringement. All of her "work" is recent, and she probably should expect to have at least a few more years of copyright to profit from. Distributing a tune recorded by the Beatles most definitely should not. In the 45 or so years since their songs were recorded, not only have they recouped their production costs, but all four members became fabulously wealthy as a result. There is/was no further need to provide the financial incentive to create for them (especially since half are dead now), and continuing to grant copyright on their works has now become a very real theft (in the literal sense) from society.
Perhaps that will be a way to address the problem in the future, but that's not the way things work now. My original point stands - the grandparent poster said you can't spoof the CID info on the originating side, and that's simply not true. It's trivially easy to do with the right provider, and telemarketers do it all the time.
No, it's not. It's documented, billable time that Thomas' lawyer could have spent working on other cases that produced real income, that is now gone forever.
I don't agree with the way things are working out for Thomas, but don't dare say this lawyer hasn't incurred a very real loss.
Also, if it gets REALLY annoying, one might consider using a call router [asterisk.org] to intelligently route unknown callers through a phone tree or directly to voice mail.
I run my VoIP service at home through an Asterisk box. Best thing since sliced bread. Not only can you route unknown callers directly to voice mail, but you can also blackhole known telemarketing numbers (I pay per minute for my service, so why should I let them waste my money?), or if you're feeling a bit abusive, route them to some really, really rude recorded message just for them.:-)
Also, you can configure the system to record any given inbound calls, with the appropriate notification given via the auto-attendant if needed. I suppose this might come in handy if one wanted to pursue the company responsible for the calls.
Unless you're originating your calls through any of a number of VoIP providers that will let you put whatever you want for the CID information, and which the rest of the phone system will happily relay to the call's destination.
If someone takes you to court and YOU win, it means they had no reason to sue you in the first place.
Or it could mean that you had better lawyers, or had enough money to pay off the judge, or that the judge was ignorant of the law as it applied to your case, or any number of other things that happen in a courtroom that have nothing to do with whether you're right or wrong.
This is why a cop can bust you in a parking lot even though they don't like to cite tickets for accidents that happen in them (they can and will get you for speeding and dangerous operation)
Perhaps in some places, but not in any state I've lived in. In Florida in particular, the law states that police can enforce state traffic laws on private property *only* when the owner has contracted with the appropriate agency for law enforcement services (see F.S. 316.006). For instance, the only reason you can get a speeding ticket at Walt Disney World is because Disney specifically contracts the Orange & Osceola County Sheriff's Offices and the Florida Highway Patrol for those services.
Being polite and standing up for yourself aren't mutually exclusive. I'm one of those guys that chooses not to oblige department stores when they ask to check bags at the exit. However, I usually just answer them with a "no, thanks" and continue walking when challenged. The people at the door aren't making enough money to have to put up with any unnecessary rudeness, and there's nothing to be gained by being a jerk. I tend to put loss prevention people in the same category, and don't see any reason to be anything but civil until they choose to ratchet things up.
I think the only time I've been outwardly rude to an actual LEO was about 10 years ago when an Orlando PD officer blocked me into my space right after I'd parked my car, and attempted to tell me that I'd illegally passed an emergency vehicle and exceeded the speed limit in a private parking lot. (he had been blocking one lane of one of the access roads talking to a PYT in another car, and I'd gone around him) After about 10 minutes of back-and-forth that started out polite but began getting heated, I ended up telling him, "you need to either arrest me for something, get back in your fucking car and leave me alone, or we'll let the county sheriff/state police sort it out". Without another word he got back in his car and drove off. Probably not the wisest course of action, but I'm sure the guy knew it just wasn't going to be worth it just to have the biggest johnson.
I don't know what is up with America. Every time a police officer arrests somebody over being a smart-arse about something trivial, you all scream FUD.
Being arrested is not trivial, particularly when it's because some useless rent-a-cop got his panties in a wad about something that was.
Qt offers quite a bit more than just an abstracted UI model. Being able to have a totally common codebase across a number of platforms for a given application (including lower-level network code, threading, non-UI graphics manipulation, file I/O, printing, etc.) is a great help.
The only thing holding me back from totally adopting Qt was the outrageous licensing cost, not anything lacking in the toolkit itself. With it having gone to LGPL now, that is no longer an issue.
A Bait and Switch is when you offer a particular product, wait for people to come to buy it, then announce you don't have it and push a different product with higher margins on them.
Witness the common pea-green Wagon Queen Family Truckster...
In the Windows world, ConTEXT offers block selection, and it's free. It's not the be-all and end-all of programming editors, but it's not bad. UltraEdit also does block selection and is otherwise pretty good on features, but it's not free.
It takes something rather more compelling to shell out hundreds of dollars per developer for a bunch of licences.
Until very recently with the 4.5 release, it was *thousands* of dollars per developer if you wanted to use Qt commercially and release your product under a non-GPL license.
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Ask for BeckerBriefs(tm) by name! Available at your nearest office supply store.
They might not be able to withdraw any more than is in the account, but can they not still load you up with overdraft charges if they try?
The graininess is because the surface of the Sun actually looks like that, not because it's a short exposure.
By the same photographer, no less.
This photo is actually of comparable quality to what you'd get from NASA, given the same conditions under which it was taken under.
Bear in mind that the photo is being taken through many, many miles of air, during the daytime, and the daytime heat causes all kinds of instabilities in the air that will show up as waviness in the image (the same phenomenon causes stars to twinkle at night). Finding steady air at night is hard enough, but getting images this clear during the day is remarkable, even taking the quick shutter speed into account.
Also bear in mind that the Sun is only about 30 arcminutes across as seen from the Earth, meaning that the Shuttle silhouette itself is at most just a very few arcseconds in size. To put it in perspective, it's on the order of getting a clear photo of the text "In God We Trust" on a dime from the other end of a (US) football field while the dime is moving at 4 feet or so per second.
It's a real photo, and it's not terribly difficult to take such photos if you have a good camera, a good telescope (Takahashi is among the best), and most importantly a good equatorial mount for the scope. For solar photos like this, add a good broadband solar filter into the mix.
Lock the scope onto the Sun, set the camera to capture frames as fast as possible, and then throw out everything that comes out crappy. There were two really good frames of the Atlantis shown, but there are no telling how many awful-looking ones were discarded. People do this kind of stuff all the time, but it just doesn't get publicized.
No, the United States does not have a "loser pays" system, and it doesn't follow that a lawyer didn't do a good job and is not deserving of payment just because he lost the case.
Yes, I perceive this to be a problem too - if you're continuing to bring in millions of dollars per year in royalties and you (and your children) are guaranteed that gravy train for the rest of your life, it takes away a lot of the incentive to get off your butt and do more.
Copyright is a reasonable idea, but the implementation is horribly, horribly broken.
Are you intending to argue that listening to music that was produced by someone else (at a cost to the producer) is an inherent natural right of human beings and therefore downloading it (without compensation to the producer) constitutes no moral or ethical injustice?
I will.
The way it's supposed to work (in the US, anyway) is that when someone creates a work, it's owned by society. However, understanding that people need to eat, they're given an exclusive right to distribute what they create for a *limited* time, the idea being that it will encourage them to keep creating new works, but that the work will revert back to society where it will enrich the cultural pool. Problem is, the whole concept of "limited time" is now one of a mere technicality, as copyright terms extend well beyond the length of the author's lifetime. Apparently, as long as Congress doesn't define the term of copyright as "forever", it's not considered to be at odds with the intent of the Constitution. This is ridiculous.
Distributing a tune recorded by Britney Spears should probably be considered copyright infringement. All of her "work" is recent, and she probably should expect to have at least a few more years of copyright to profit from. Distributing a tune recorded by the Beatles most definitely should not. In the 45 or so years since their songs were recorded, not only have they recouped their production costs, but all four members became fabulously wealthy as a result. There is/was no further need to provide the financial incentive to create for them (especially since half are dead now), and continuing to grant copyright on their works has now become a very real theft (in the literal sense) from society.
Perhaps that will be a way to address the problem in the future, but that's not the way things work now. My original point stands - the grandparent poster said you can't spoof the CID info on the originating side, and that's simply not true. It's trivially easy to do with the right provider, and telemarketers do it all the time.
No, it's not. It's documented, billable time that Thomas' lawyer could have spent working on other cases that produced real income, that is now gone forever.
I don't agree with the way things are working out for Thomas, but don't dare say this lawyer hasn't incurred a very real loss.
Government of the people, by the elite, and for the elite...
Also, if it gets REALLY annoying, one might consider using a call router [asterisk.org] to intelligently route unknown callers through a phone tree or directly to voice mail.
:-)
I run my VoIP service at home through an Asterisk box. Best thing since sliced bread. Not only can you route unknown callers directly to voice mail, but you can also blackhole known telemarketing numbers (I pay per minute for my service, so why should I let them waste my money?), or if you're feeling a bit abusive, route them to some really, really rude recorded message just for them.
Also, you can configure the system to record any given inbound calls, with the appropriate notification given via the auto-attendant if needed. I suppose this might come in handy if one wanted to pursue the company responsible for the calls.
Unless you're originating your calls through any of a number of VoIP providers that will let you put whatever you want for the CID information, and which the rest of the phone system will happily relay to the call's destination.
If someone takes you to court and YOU win, it means they had no reason to sue you in the first place.
Or it could mean that you had better lawyers, or had enough money to pay off the judge, or that the judge was ignorant of the law as it applied to your case, or any number of other things that happen in a courtroom that have nothing to do with whether you're right or wrong.
Disregard my previous post, and my apologies - I was thinking "Fantastic Voyage", not "Gangster's Paradise".
I think you mean Lakeside, not Stevie Wonder. :-)
mmmm....spaghetti....
This is why a cop can bust you in a parking lot even though they don't like to cite tickets for accidents that happen in them (they can and will get you for speeding and dangerous operation)
Perhaps in some places, but not in any state I've lived in. In Florida in particular, the law states that police can enforce state traffic laws on private property *only* when the owner has contracted with the appropriate agency for law enforcement services (see F.S. 316.006). For instance, the only reason you can get a speeding ticket at Walt Disney World is because Disney specifically contracts the Orange & Osceola County Sheriff's Offices and the Florida Highway Patrol for those services.
Being polite and standing up for yourself aren't mutually exclusive. I'm one of those guys that chooses not to oblige department stores when they ask to check bags at the exit. However, I usually just answer them with a "no, thanks" and continue walking when challenged. The people at the door aren't making enough money to have to put up with any unnecessary rudeness, and there's nothing to be gained by being a jerk. I tend to put loss prevention people in the same category, and don't see any reason to be anything but civil until they choose to ratchet things up.
I think the only time I've been outwardly rude to an actual LEO was about 10 years ago when an Orlando PD officer blocked me into my space right after I'd parked my car, and attempted to tell me that I'd illegally passed an emergency vehicle and exceeded the speed limit in a private parking lot. (he had been blocking one lane of one of the access roads talking to a PYT in another car, and I'd gone around him) After about 10 minutes of back-and-forth that started out polite but began getting heated, I ended up telling him, "you need to either arrest me for something, get back in your fucking car and leave me alone, or we'll let the county sheriff/state police sort it out". Without another word he got back in his car and drove off. Probably not the wisest course of action, but I'm sure the guy knew it just wasn't going to be worth it just to have the biggest johnson.
I don't know what is up with America. Every time a police officer arrests somebody over being a smart-arse about something trivial, you all scream FUD.
Being arrested is not trivial, particularly when it's because some useless rent-a-cop got his panties in a wad about something that was.
Qt offers quite a bit more than just an abstracted UI model. Being able to have a totally common codebase across a number of platforms for a given application (including lower-level network code, threading, non-UI graphics manipulation, file I/O, printing, etc.) is a great help.
The only thing holding me back from totally adopting Qt was the outrageous licensing cost, not anything lacking in the toolkit itself. With it having gone to LGPL now, that is no longer an issue.
A Bait and Switch is when you offer a particular product, wait for people to come to buy it, then announce you don't have it and push a different product with higher margins on them.
Witness the common pea-green Wagon Queen Family Truckster...
In the Windows world, ConTEXT offers block selection, and it's free. It's not the be-all and end-all of programming editors, but it's not bad. UltraEdit also does block selection and is otherwise pretty good on features, but it's not free.
It takes something rather more compelling to shell out hundreds of dollars per developer for a bunch of licences.
Until very recently with the 4.5 release, it was *thousands* of dollars per developer if you wanted to use Qt commercially and release your product under a non-GPL license.