if you need some sort of "content management system" to power your website, you probably aren't the type of person who should be having a web site. It only takes 30 minutes or so to custom build something that does exactly what you want it to [...]
Are you saying every web site out there should run on software written ad hoc, only for this one site, and every developer who needs more than 30 minutes to build it is an untalented loser?
[...] rather than spending probably hours configuring some bizarre conglomeration of weird things, that you'll then have to spend hours trying to figure out the code, if you have to make changes at that level.
I see, so you were unable to find one of the CMSs that run admirably right out of the box/package and offer lots of great features, and now you're pissed at CMSs in general and refuse to touch any of them again? There are several open source solutions you can get into at the source level in just one afternoon, which pays off in days and weeks of time saved every time you need to make a change or set up another site. I particularly like systems like Antville and Textpattern that let you change large parts of their own code right within your site itself. These aren't full blown, enterprise grade CMSs, but as these take months to develop, that's not what you're thinking of anyway. In 30 minutes you can write a little CGI script, but that won't offer validated HTML and CSS that works with pretty much every user agent, secure user accounts with multiple levels of privileges, etc. etc. Furthermore, your notion that only software developers should have web sites is just plain bonkers.
Or maybe there was some misunderstanding you could clear up?
which click shows me all these things on one web page again? One web page, not multiple ones...
Allright, you win. The dashboard really is necessary and using the web to pull information from the internet is just too weird and old-fashioned. Say I go on a business trip to New York. I'll have to find a cheap gas station so I can refuel my car before going to the airport, find out the best route to get there, check the weather report so I know what clothes to pack, look for information on New York from Wikipedia, take note of historical events that happened on the day I'll arrive there so I'll have some material for small talk, look up some cocktail recipes in order to make duty-free shop purchase decisions, check a US TV guide so I'll know what to watch in my hotel room, and check my FedEx tracking information to see if anything will arrive while I'm gone. And being the super-intelligent uebermensch I am (all Mac users are, right?), able to process all of that information at a glance, I will need all of this information at once, at the same time, and listen to some BBC programme while I'm at it so the rest of my brain doesn't get bored. Sure, I'll have to buy a faster Mac to keep all of those widgets running all the time, plus a 23" cinema display to show them all at once, but as dashboard is the most important Apple innovation of all time, it'll sure be worth it!
What about
4) Share music only with friends that you trust.
While technically unlawful [...]
in which country is it unlawful to share music with trusted friends? That's not quite a public performance, is it?
[...] if you chip in with 20 or 30 other people to buy copyrighted material and make copies for each person in the group [...]
Now that's a really good idea. Why aren't we doing this already? Considering how everyone around here has 20 to 30 trusted friends who all listen to exactly the same music...
However, I do pronounce LASER as laser the word. Laser is no longer just an acronym.
It's nice that you care about intelligible pronunciation, but I'd like to inform you that an acronym is not what you think it is. If you look the term up in a dictionary, you should find out that acronyms, like LASER (actually I'd spell that Laser according to my style guide but in this particular case that point is moot anyway, because it has turned into the word laser) are meant to be pronounced as words. SQL is not an acronym, it's an abbreviation.
Wouldn't it make more sense to pull the air away from the drive?
No, it wouldn't. A fan generates a stream of air that you can direct anywhere you want, but you can't control where the air that goes in comes from. If your CPU fan blows outwards, that's OK because all the air that goes in has to pass through the heatsink, which is what the fan is about, and the 'exhaust' stream is hopefully pointed in the general direction of a PSU or case fan so the hot air will be moved out of the case.
But when there's nothing to guide the airflow (observe the big gap between the harddisk and its fan), letting it blow straight on the drive is the best you can do in order to move hot air away. Fans blow, they don't 'pull'. You can try that out: take a toy boat that moves by shooting out a water jet. Mod it so it will suck in water. It won't move a millimeter.
This is so sad. Politicians give a series of video games the image of "these are about fucking and killing prostitutes" and the public swallows that, without ever questioning how many of these politicians ever actually played any GTA title, however briefly.
It doesn't make you kill prostitutes. Just something you are free to do, as in real life.
Exactly. And more importantly, there isn't any incentive to or reward for killing anyone, with the exception of gangsters that are part of your missions/quests/minigames. I can only talk about GTA3, because the previous titles didn't feature hookers (seeing pedesitrians only from above, only being able to make out their heads and shoulders, you couldn't tell them apart from ordinary pedestrians anyway) and I didn't play Vice City or San Andreas, but I believe these latter ones are quite similar in this repect: The game explicitly rewards you for driving passengers to their destinations in a taxi, extinguishing fires with a fire engine, and taking wounded characters to the hospital. But kill a hooker and all you get is trouble: The police will hunt you down. Sure, you can let one into your car and if you park in a quiet place the car will rock and squeak a bit (with both your avatar and the prostiture sitting calmly in their respective places, not doing anything in particular) and the score that represents how good you feel physically will get up a bit. It's a reward for sex, but executed in a very abstract style, not more explicit than Super Mario squishing his opponents to mush by jumping on them.
So I wonder where the "fuck and then kill hoes" meme originated? Maybe it was Raph Koster's talk in which he mentioned that gamers do not see this happening, but rather see a power-up?
If anyone has played a GTA title in which first letting a prostitute into your car and then killing her achieves anything, please speak up,
but from what I've seen by actually playing GTA3 the game mechanics firstly don't encourage this behaviour, and secondly are very abstract and arcade-like. For a politician who never played a videogame in his/her life and just saw some screenshots of a recent GTA title, the game looks kind of realistic, with the nice textures and shading and adequate poly-count. But once you play it, this becomes just an interface to a bunch of little, primitive games; entertaining, but shallow and not more realistic than Super Mario. Drag a cabbie out of his taxi and he will go into his angry "this is my car! don't take it away!" routine, as if it's a personality that really cares. Then switch on the 'vacant' sign (triggering a chauffeur mission) and this very same person will hitch a ride, in the vehicle you just took away from him. Kill a target, but fail to complete the entire mission, and without restorign a savegame, but just by accepting the very same mission a second time, the target will be there again, as if nothing happened. Run over an abstract power-up floating in mid-air and the police will stop following you, or you'll get some magic protection from bullets. And you'll think, "Oh! OK. This is not a role-playing game. It's not an adventure game either. It's just an arcade game about driving from A to B and then maybe to C, and shooting some targets every now and then. There's no real death, no real sex. Not even virtually real. Just Pac-Man-like game mechanics." And if there's any lesson you'll take back into the real world it's an appreciation of how different cars handle differently, eg what a long breaking distance a heavy bus has and that a Porsche can actually be a safer car than a minivan, as you can more easily avoid crashing into obstacles without making it tip over. Last time I saw an ambulance with blue lights flashing in my rear-view mirror, I immediately throttled my speed and steered to the very edge of the motorway, remembering how I was in the ambulance driver's when playing GTA3 and people tried to react my approach in the most idiotic, dangerous ways. To be fair, I also started taking note of parked coaches that were empty, with the door open and the engine running, thinking "hmm, nice vehicle".
"Time flies like an arrow."
"Fruit flies like a banana."
The second sentence points out that the first could be interpreted, apart from its common meaning, as telling you about the mysterious species of the time flies, which like an arrow. But wait, there's more! It could also be read as an instruction demanding that you time flies like you would time an arrow. According to my linguistics prof, there's a fourth way to read it, but I haven't found it yet. Maybe a native English speaker could help? Update For for the offtopic rant. Appreciate all the replies.
This is probably key - professional steadicam operators are trained specifically in how to operate a steadicam (they're not just camera operators who decide to strap on a rig one day for kicks). If you've ever seen any behind-the-scenes footage of steadicam shots being filmed, it's pretty amazing how smoothly these guys move.
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to say: This is not even wrong. (I like saying that.)
Professional steadicam operators use equipment that is completely different from consumer/prosumer 'steadicam'-ish gear. They come in teams of two: The one carrying the rig isn't able to look through a viewfinder, so a second person has to control focus, aperture etc. The apparatus has so much inertia that the carrier can actually hop up and down and the camera will still hardly move, let alone rotate. Lots of practice is only half of the story: the huge weight strapped to the body kind of forces the operator to move smoothly, anything else would be totally exhausting.
Equipment in the two figure dollar range, on the other hand, isn't more than a handheld tripod that keeps the centre of gravity around your hands by introducing a counter-weight that roughly equals the weight of your camera. With consumer cameras becoming ever smaller and lighter, that isn't much. Jerks introduced by shaky hands are pretty much all they can compensate for somewhat adequately.
However, this isn't what ars technica actually tested: They walked down a street. The picture resulting from this has to be shaky hand cam style. The "little bit of shake" that the reviewer attested is actually insanely wild. If you haven't got a more expensive steadicam setup, you really only have these two options: Either purposely go for the blair witch style, or let only the actor walk (when shown in the picture, as opposed to the 1st person view) and put the camra person plus camera on some sort of wheeled vehicle, like a dolly with a tripod.
It seems like the ars techinca reviewers had too much fun doing their oh-so-cool project; not only were they too enthusiastic about the marginal improvement in image quality, they also didn't really factor in the problems they had (they needed much longer than the make mag instructions projected and ran into issues the instructions didn't even touch on) when writing the concluding summary.
Not that there's anything bad about this: With a USD 14 handheld tripod, you're supposed to have fun, not emulate Oscar-league steadicam gear. And yes you can train to move super-smooth, but still steadicam and steady camcorder are two entirely different issues.
You are right: I had accidentially ignored the fact that median values are used, which deal with the issue of 1/3 of the US's wealth belonging to just 1% of the population. But still the flatter distribution of Swedish incomes means that poor Swedes are generally (ie on average) closer up to the Swedish median value than poor Americans are to the American median value, and household gross income still isn't the only factor as far as the standard of living is concerned. That aside, the Swedes are even poorer than I thought already, thanks for the correction.
Though they think of themselves as prosperous, Swedes as a group are actually worse off than black Americans, according to this Swedish study.
What the linked study says is true, the numbers are sound. But numbers like the GDP per capita are only a part of the picture. If you condense the statistics down to one average American and one average Swede, you ignore that there are lots of poor Americans who are made up for by the top 1% Americans who have 1/3 of the wealth. In Sweden that curve is a lot more even. If you have a look at reports plotting the quality of life in countries of the world, Sweden usually makes the top 5 while the US aren't even in the top 20. Another issue with the GDP/capita is that, while it is a nicely internationally standardised and generally useful figure, it measures how much people produce. Americans produce more, thus earn higher wages, and use those to consume more. In the process they harm their environment much more, which isn't represented by the GDP. The US also have a huge national debt. In comparison, your average Swedes do have problems with unemployment, but those that have work also choose to work less and have more leisure time. They also don't want to have 3 TV sets and 2 cars per household.
As far as the economic statistics go, I don't intend to contradict the parent poster at all, I just want to say you have to take them with the customary grain of salt. It's a different story with the crime rates: The parent is plain wrong. Crime rates in Sweden, and most of the EU in general, are lower than in the US. The provided link didn't work for me; maybe it was related to that Interpol report that inflated Sweden's murder rate to some 500% because of a statistical error? Again you must take care not to oversimplify things; maybe there are more pickpockets per capita in Sweden than in the US, or maybe they catch more pickpockets in Sweden (because the police aren't so occupied with homicides?), but when you visit Sweden you definitely don't have to be afraid that something really bad will happen to you. The crime rate is low.
Speaking of crimes, the actual topic would have been something about piracy or so? Oh well. Maybe next time.
/usr/share/dict $ grep -ic ii words 419
--
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
The sig is what makes this post doubleplusfunny.
But to stay on topic: I you wrote proper code, you would never, never ever search/grep or a variable like 'i'. Such a variable name belongs to a small loop (e.g. one that iterates through an array and increments an index) that can be read and understood quickly. It still might be better, depending on the circumstances, to call it 'count', 'xCoord', or 'offset', if that's what it is, but the point is that it is only defined within a small block and its function can easily be understood in that context. However, if a variable is used throughout the whole program, so you'd actually like to search for all the places it's used in, giving it a descriptive name is a must. Using 'i', 'j' and 'k' all over the place and doing all kinds of things with and to them is absolutely insane.
This article was focused on a single point pretty much, SLR or non-SLR.
That by itself isn't so bad, a lot of people like to learn wether choosing an expensive SLR would pay off for them. However, half of the article is about how a bigger sensor gives you a shallower depth of field and how bad that can be in many situations. And this is patent nonsense. An SLR gives you the possibility to make the depth of field shallow, but the much larger size of the sensor makes it possible to catch more light, thus you can tighten the aperture and get a really large depth of field as well.
A large part of the rest of the article deals with all those manual settings an SLR offers you and how bad that is when you just want to take a couple of quick snap-shots. Again, this is nonsense, because in reality a good SLR will give you the possibility of setting everything according to your preferences, but doesn't force you to do that. They have autofocus and auto-exposure just like cheaper models, and usually they choose these parameters more cleverly as well. As a bonus, they don't only allow you to take a quick snap-shot as any other camera, but a good one will take a dozen uncompressed, high-quality pictures in a matter of one or two seconds. You can choose the one you like best and discard the others. Now that gives you a good snapshot.
In summary, the more you pay for a camera, the more options and possibilities you will get. Surprise surprise, who would have thought that. Depth of field and ease of use are non-isues, the article gets this very wrong. But yes, if you couldn't care less what depth of field or aperture even is, you might never want to set these manually and thus not want to pay for such advanced optiones.
If anyone's interested in the opinion of a native German speaker (with recidences in two cities located at the danube [= Donau]:-): You can construct very long words in the German language, but it's not required and mostly considered poor style. Oberammergaueralpenkrauterdelikatessenfruehstuecks kaese is not a German word, it's a fantasy product name. Vierwaldstaetterseedampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft is a fantasy company name, also not a German word. Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftsoberka pitaen is a proper German word, but it is only used when someone wants to construct a very long world. It's a job title that refers to a position that only existed in an earlier time, when Austria's bureaucracy was infamous for using overly pompous technical terms that were very difficult to decipher for a layman. Fussballweltmeisterschaftsqualifikationsspielis a proper German word, and it's even used in practice sometimes. It's the proper translation for "soccer world championship qualifying game". But seriously, would you consider this monster term over "qualifying game for the soccer world championship"? Nah. So it's the term that's silly, not the language. And usually the context would have already been established when you want to use the term, so just saying 'qualifier' would do just as well.
Oh well... I should change my sig to "You should see what happens when I don't even intend to post on topic to begin with."
Often it is difficult to figure out why certain options are dimmed and under what context they will become active.
In a poorly designed app, this can be annoying, but I doubt that the proposed solution would be useful in the general case. If you can't paste, do you need to have explained to you that there's nothing apropriate to paste in the clipboard? I'd say in pretty much every case it's something as simple as that. This is hardly one of the top ten persistent design flaws, and I certainly wouldn't choose it as my favourite. (Maybe the applications I use are better designed than the average one?)
And for those who didn't RTFA (link to Google cache, actual article seems to be/.ed already): That they're dimmed is not a problem, but a feature. Making unavailable options disappear would be an absolute design sin. It just says they should be clickable and lead to an explanation of why they're dimmed.
Yes indeed, a console doesn't need a powerful CPU any more than a bathtub needs a good amount of warm water. But people who use it will want it anyway.
Real-time 3d graphics of cinematic quality will always be too slow for general purpose CPUs.
This statement is so silly, it's not even wrong.
developing a game with AI that needs ten times the power of todays CPUs will take many man years and may not be that welcomed by the console audience.
A typical PS3 game takes many person-years to develop, regardless of wheter it uses any AI. For many games, it's a matter of days to develop an AI that needs ten times the power of today's CPUs. Making it so it uses only a fraction of the power of a current CPU is the difficult and time-intensive task. Console-gamers play much more single player games than PC users, so it is particularly them who welcome a sophisticaed AI.
It's very difficult to do multithreaded apps, and the difficulty rises exponentially with the number of threads.
It's very easy to make multimedia-processing apps multi-threaded and rendering scales particularly well over multiple CPUs. If the engine uses an API like OpenGL or D3D, it doesn't even have to know how many threads are used to render the visuals, the programmer doesn't have to do anything. Many AI algorithms also scale pretty well over multiple threads and/or closely coupled CPUs.
[Sony should concentrate on graphics chips instead of general purpose CPUs.]
They could save millions of dollars from developing and advertising the new console. [Instead of re-using the old one, just with more GFC chips.]
These CPUs aren't 'general purpose' in the sense like a 486 is general purpose. They are specifically optimised for parallel operations, floating point calculations, vector math... So they can save even more money the way they're ding it, because they can re-use the same architecture in lots and ltos of media processign devices, not just gaming consoles, and they can not just scale pure graphics performance, but also audio performance, video performance, whatever is suited to the Cell architecture.
i dont know much about this sort of thing, but if its true that the data is backwards on the disc, couldnt you simply reverse the order of the data in the iso before burning it? or is there something else that precludes this?
As we said, the laser moves in the opposite direction, but the disc does not spin in the opposite direction, so the whole spiral is flipped over, like in a mirror image. So unless you find a portal to the mirror world and trade a DVD burner with your mirror twin over there (reverse the order of the pins in the plugs before you attach it to your system!), just reversing the data won't cut it.
Just memorize the 13th root of every 100-digit number in existence.
Boy, you're such an overachiever. Unfortunately, the article doesn't say, but as the result was recited in a matter of seconds, I think it's save to assume that it had to be an integer number. So you'd just have to memorise the 13th power of every integer for which it is 100 digits long. This reduces the number of possible tuples down to less than ten million -- eeeeasy!
I haven't got a GC myself so I can't verify this, but many sources claim that the spiral of pits and lands on the discs is indeed backwards. It isn't read by spinning the disc backwards, as can be easily verified by opening the lid while it's spinning, but the laser moves from the outer rim inwards. I don't know for sure, but I think this is true; I think this is how that huge "spins backwards" myth was started. I wonder if this could be compensated for with a driver, or if a regular DVD burner could be hacked to write apropriate media with a firmware flash.
The point of the original poster was that while Macs do cost lots of money, legitimately collecting enough music to fill a state-of-the-art harddrive also costs lots of money (unless, by a big coincidence, all the music you like happens to be under a creative commons or similar license). Of course you spent money on music, and not for the purpose of minimising your iPod's free disk space. This is true, but irrelevant, just like the fact that you don't have to purchase your music through the iTMS is true, but irrelevant. I can't see why the comment pointing this out got moderated up so much.
Of course I guess if you are going to drop the $10,000 to legitimatly fill your iPod...
ok lets settle this...purchasing music from iTMS or "stealing" music from P2P is not the only way to fill an iPod. Of course, my CD collection might be a tad larger than yours.
Rrrriiiiiight. And you got all of those CDs for free.
But no software to install... this means that it has to store (or at least transmit) my IM chat history.
Err, well, yes, but this is pretty much the whole point of this service. Maybe you know this situation: you use ICQ (or Jabber or whatever) from home 99,5% of the time, only sometimes you have to log in from somewhere else and have a short conversation with someone. The problems with these short conversations is that they're all missing from your logs. But if you have an IM Smarter account, you can associate all your accounts with it, from all IM networks, and all locations/computers, and search through all these logs at once.
Yes, it's a privacy nightmare, one of those cases where you sacrifice good security practices for a neat feature. But if you don't encrypt all your IM messages anyway (which would make IM smarter unusable to begin with), you're going down that route already and can just as well go it all the way. Just keep critical/sensitive info to other, secure media.
I think that clause 4.2 that seems to worry you so much just says that if they, say, want to optimise their database queries, they might not do that themselves, but hire someone else to do it, and as they'll have to give him a part of their database as test data to work on, he might see your nickname and birthdate scroll by on his terminal. Which is why they'll make him sign a contract that says he'll keep everything he sees confident. I can't know for sure, but I think there's nothing more to read into this.
To boot, it parse phone numbers, web sites and EMAIL ADRESSES.
Where does it say they parse such data or anything else? Didn't read somethign like that anywhere. They just save a log, which you can search.
i've got a P3/700, with 256, and i think it's a Radeon 8500? Whatever the highest end PCI Radeon was. Q3 doesn't even play at 800x600 let alone anything new.
hmm, maybe you've misconfigured something or bad luck with your particular card, but the requirements of Q3 are even much lower. when i played it, i did so at a 350MHz P2 with 196MB RAM and an ancient matrox G400, and it ran perfectly. the details weren't maxed out of course, but quite okay, same with the resolution. sure, new games won't run on your box, but Q3 should.
Just forbid or jam cell phones anywhere where you wouldn't want pictures taken.
Actually, it would make a little more sense to ban cameras where you wouldn't want pictures taken. By the way, small digital cameras are even smaller if there isn't a phone attached to them. (And if there is, jaming it won't really impress the camera much.) There are USB memory sticks with cameras integrated, sold for cheap in ordinary electronics stores. You can sneak much larger things into a locker room.
Absurdly idiotic 'security measures' that don't make anything more secure, but just convince people that this or that politician really cares about them... you know... "in the wake of 9/11" -- when will it stop?
When went to Italy a few years ago, I noticed that Coke costs at least 1.5 times as much as it does here -- if you're lucky. I can't imagine that it costs that much more to manufacture it
But it's true, and you can imagine it, you just need to try. Well, okay, part of the reason why Coke is more expensive in Europe is probably because people can and will pay the higher price. But it also is more expensive to manufacture, because, for example, the people who fill it into bottles need to be paid more over here. They have to earn more because their cost of living is higher, because Coke costs more:-)
Now I'm getting even more off topic than I was to begin with, but here's another thought I just had: I think Europeans don't drink as much sweet soda as Americans do. I mostly drink water and juice to kill the thirst, and while I can get foo brand soda at pretty much the same price, 'the real thing(tm)' is more expensive. It's nothing I guzzle all the time, it's almost a bit of a luxury (like chocolate). So the higher price is justified -- firstly to hold up the image (the best cola in the world at a discount price -- unthinkable!), secondly to make up for the lower quantity in which it's consumed over here.
I'm sure only a tiny fraction of the price difference goes back to the USA, but I wouldn't be surprised if the total sum -- over all bottles and cans sold outside the states -- amounted to, well, you know, some pretty huge amount.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe there was some misunderstanding you could clear up?
But when there's nothing to guide the airflow (observe the big gap between the harddisk and its fan), letting it blow straight on the drive is the best you can do in order to move hot air away. Fans blow, they don't 'pull'. You can try that out: take a toy boat that moves by shooting out a water jet. Mod it so it will suck in water. It won't move a millimeter.
So I wonder where the "fuck and then kill hoes" meme originated? Maybe it was Raph Koster's talk in which he mentioned that gamers do not see this happening, but rather see a power-up?
If anyone has played a GTA title in which first letting a prostitute into your car and then killing her achieves anything, please speak up,
but from what I've seen by actually playing GTA3 the game mechanics firstly don't encourage this behaviour, and secondly are very abstract and arcade-like. For a politician who never played a videogame in his/her life and just saw some screenshots of a recent GTA title, the game looks kind of realistic, with the nice textures and shading and adequate poly-count. But once you play it, this becomes just an interface to a bunch of little, primitive games; entertaining, but shallow and not more realistic than Super Mario. Drag a cabbie out of his taxi and he will go into his angry "this is my car! don't take it away!" routine, as if it's a personality that really cares. Then switch on the 'vacant' sign (triggering a chauffeur mission) and this very same person will hitch a ride, in the vehicle you just took away from him. Kill a target, but fail to complete the entire mission, and without restorign a savegame, but just by accepting the very same mission a second time, the target will be there again, as if nothing happened. Run over an abstract power-up floating in mid-air and the police will stop following you, or you'll get some magic protection from bullets. And you'll think, "Oh! OK. This is not a role-playing game. It's not an adventure game either. It's just an arcade game about driving from A to B and then maybe to C, and shooting some targets every now and then. There's no real death, no real sex. Not even virtually real. Just Pac-Man-like game mechanics." And if there's any lesson you'll take back into the real world it's an appreciation of how different cars handle differently, eg what a long breaking distance a heavy bus has and that a Porsche can actually be a safer car than a minivan, as you can more easily avoid crashing into obstacles without making it tip over. Last time I saw an ambulance with blue lights flashing in my rear-view mirror, I immediately throttled my speed and steered to the very edge of the motorway, remembering how I was in the ambulance driver's when playing GTA3 and people tried to react my approach in the most idiotic, dangerous ways. To be fair, I also started taking note of parked coaches that were empty, with the door open and the engine running, thinking "hmm, nice vehicle".
Professional steadicam operators use equipment that is completely different from consumer/prosumer 'steadicam'-ish gear. They come in teams of two: The one carrying the rig isn't able to look through a viewfinder, so a second person has to control focus, aperture etc. The apparatus has so much inertia that the carrier can actually hop up and down and the camera will still hardly move, let alone rotate. Lots of practice is only half of the story: the huge weight strapped to the body kind of forces the operator to move smoothly, anything else would be totally exhausting.
Equipment in the two figure dollar range, on the other hand, isn't more than a handheld tripod that keeps the centre of gravity around your hands by introducing a counter-weight that roughly equals the weight of your camera. With consumer cameras becoming ever smaller and lighter, that isn't much. Jerks introduced by shaky hands are pretty much all they can compensate for somewhat adequately.
However, this isn't what ars technica actually tested: They walked down a street. The picture resulting from this has to be shaky hand cam style. The "little bit of shake" that the reviewer attested is actually insanely wild. If you haven't got a more expensive steadicam setup, you really only have these two options: Either purposely go for the blair witch style, or let only the actor walk (when shown in the picture, as opposed to the 1st person view) and put the camra person plus camera on some sort of wheeled vehicle, like a dolly with a tripod.
It seems like the ars techinca reviewers had too much fun doing their oh-so-cool project; not only were they too enthusiastic about the marginal improvement in image quality, they also didn't really factor in the problems they had (they needed much longer than the make mag instructions projected and ran into issues the instructions didn't even touch on) when writing the concluding summary.
Not that there's anything bad about this: With a USD 14 handheld tripod, you're supposed to have fun, not emulate Oscar-league steadicam gear. And yes you can train to move super-smooth, but still steadicam and steady camcorder are two entirely different issues.
You are right: I had accidentially ignored the fact that median values are used, which deal with the issue of 1/3 of the US's wealth belonging to just 1% of the population. But still the flatter distribution of Swedish incomes means that poor Swedes are generally (ie on average) closer up to the Swedish median value than poor Americans are to the American median value, and household gross income still isn't the only factor as far as the standard of living is concerned. That aside, the Swedes are even poorer than I thought already, thanks for the correction.
As far as the economic statistics go, I don't intend to contradict the parent poster at all, I just want to say you have to take them with the customary grain of salt. It's a different story with the crime rates: The parent is plain wrong. Crime rates in Sweden, and most of the EU in general, are lower than in the US. The provided link didn't work for me; maybe it was related to that Interpol report that inflated Sweden's murder rate to some 500% because of a statistical error? Again you must take care not to oversimplify things; maybe there are more pickpockets per capita in Sweden than in the US, or maybe they catch more pickpockets in Sweden (because the police aren't so occupied with homicides?), but when you visit Sweden you definitely don't have to be afraid that something really bad will happen to you. The crime rate is low.
Speaking of crimes, the actual topic would have been something about piracy or so? Oh well. Maybe next time.
But to stay on topic: I you wrote proper code, you would never, never ever search/grep or a variable like 'i'. Such a variable name belongs to a small loop (e.g. one that iterates through an array and increments an index) that can be read and understood quickly. It still might be better, depending on the circumstances, to call it 'count', 'xCoord', or 'offset', if that's what it is, but the point is that it is only defined within a small block and its function can easily be understood in that context. However, if a variable is used throughout the whole program, so you'd actually like to search for all the places it's used in, giving it a descriptive name is a must. Using 'i', 'j' and 'k' all over the place and doing all kinds of things with and to them is absolutely insane.
A large part of the rest of the article deals with all those manual settings an SLR offers you and how bad that is when you just want to take a couple of quick snap-shots. Again, this is nonsense, because in reality a good SLR will give you the possibility of setting everything according to your preferences, but doesn't force you to do that. They have autofocus and auto-exposure just like cheaper models, and usually they choose these parameters more cleverly as well. As a bonus, they don't only allow you to take a quick snap-shot as any other camera, but a good one will take a dozen uncompressed, high-quality pictures in a matter of one or two seconds. You can choose the one you like best and discard the others. Now that gives you a good snapshot.
In summary, the more you pay for a camera, the more options and possibilities you will get. Surprise surprise, who would have thought that. Depth of field and ease of use are non-isues, the article gets this very wrong. But yes, if you couldn't care less what depth of field or aperture even is, you might never want to set these manually and thus not want to pay for such advanced optiones.
If anyone's interested in the opinion of a native German speaker (with recidences in two cities located at the danube [= Donau] :-): You can construct very long words in the German language, but it's not required and mostly considered poor style. Oberammergaueralpenkrauterdelikatessenfruehstuecks kaese is not a German word, it's a fantasy product name. Vierwaldstaetterseedampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft is a fantasy company name, also not a German word. Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftsoberka pitaen is a proper German word, but it is only used when someone wants to construct a very long world. It's a job title that refers to a position that only existed in an earlier time, when Austria's bureaucracy was infamous for using overly pompous technical terms that were very difficult to decipher for a layman. Fussballweltmeisterschaftsqualifikationsspiel is a proper German word, and it's even used in practice sometimes. It's the proper translation for "soccer world championship qualifying game". But seriously, would you consider this monster term over "qualifying game for the soccer world championship"? Nah. So it's the term that's silly, not the language. And usually the context would have already been established when you want to use the term, so just saying 'qualifier' would do just as well.
... I should change my sig to "You should see what happens when I don't even intend to post on topic to begin with."
Oh well
Yes, it's a privacy nightmare, one of those cases where you sacrifice good security practices for a neat feature. But if you don't encrypt all your IM messages anyway (which would make IM smarter unusable to begin with), you're going down that route already and can just as well go it all the way. Just keep critical/sensitive info to other, secure media.
I think that clause 4.2 that seems to worry you so much just says that if they, say, want to optimise their database queries, they might not do that themselves, but hire someone else to do it, and as they'll have to give him a part of their database as test data to work on, he might see your nickname and birthdate scroll by on his terminal. Which is why they'll make him sign a contract that says he'll keep everything he sees confident. I can't know for sure, but I think there's nothing more to read into this.
Where does it say they parse such data or anything else? Didn't read somethign like that anywhere. They just save a log, which you can search.
Absurdly idiotic 'security measures' that don't make anything more secure, but just convince people that this or that politician really cares about them
Now I'm getting even more off topic than I was to begin with, but here's another thought I just had: I think Europeans don't drink as much sweet soda as Americans do. I mostly drink water and juice to kill the thirst, and while I can get foo brand soda at pretty much the same price, 'the real thing(tm)' is more expensive. It's nothing I guzzle all the time, it's almost a bit of a luxury (like chocolate). So the higher price is justified -- firstly to hold up the image (the best cola in the world at a discount price -- unthinkable!), secondly to make up for the lower quantity in which it's consumed over here.
I'm sure only a tiny fraction of the price difference goes back to the USA, but I wouldn't be surprised if the total sum -- over all bottles and cans sold outside the states -- amounted to, well, you know, some pretty huge amount.