Many amateur astronomers now use CCD or other digital cameras to captured dozens (if not hundreds) of images in sequence, and use "image stacking" programs to combine many images into one.
There are some very good examples online if you search. The image stacking seems to reduce the effect of atmospheric turbulence. The effects of the air are always changing and so they tend to average out whereas your target (Mars in this case) will remain constant.
I originally bought them from Target but stopped by a few days ago for the first time in a long time and learned that the don't sell them anymore. Oh, the wonders of the American marketing machine.
Or maybe Target simply wasn't selling many to justify stocking them. Everyone I know buys their compact flourescents home improvement centers like Home Depot or Lowes simply because those places pretty much have every shape and style you might want.
No, I asked if it *had* to suck. I know it sucks. I'm in my 30's. Trust me, I know.:-\
But does it HAVE to suck? I think Plato asked that one first.
In fact, I'm thinking of starting a good misanthropy web site because I there doesn't seem to be any really good ones out there, although Maddox comes close sometimes.
Where's the questions on energy policy? Where's the challenges to the FUD on her site? Where's the questions about the economy- you know... the thing that sparked the recall election in the first place? Geez, at least toss in one about the car tax.
This was a gabfest- a chatroom transcript.
Californians should find it frightening that a wealthy Republican can buy himself another election.
Well, some of us, while not Republicans, don't buy into the Big Evil Republican Bogeyman that the opposition trots out every 3 nanoseconds in lieu of actual thought or ideas.
And Issa dropped out, so what's your point? He could have spent $100 million and not gotten 2 million signatures if the sentiment for a recall did not exist. Some of us find it refreshing to see that voters can still flex a little muscle. See the Constitution Of California, Article II, Sections 13-20. The recall election process is built into the state Constitution as well as the state election codes.There were stringent numbers to be met for the recall effort. The recall has stood firm against several legal and media challenges.
As for Republicans, the recall is also endorsed by the Libertarians and the American Independents. In fact, many key Republicans have the stance that they should be focusing more on defeating Barbara Boxer or re-electing Bush in the next regular elections.
Ah, what's the point... She's just another ideologue without any real, workable solutions. Does humanity really have to suck this badly?
Erratic betting is the first thing most counting system developers tell you to avoid. I've been counting in Vegas casinos for 15 years without a problem, even on good nights. If you're a solo counter, you have little to worry about because the casinos have bigger fish to fry, such as the team efforts you mentioned. The worst you want to do is let a win ride, so you never bet more than twice your previous bet, and if it comes after a win it looks natural.
ObGamblingAnecdote: Winter of 1997. In town for CES. Horseshoe Casino, $25 single deck table. Me and three others playing at around 2am. Second deal after a new shuffle.
All four of us get Blackjacks.
I wasn't positive how many cards got dealt in the first hand after the shuffle (in a basic count system, you add or subtract their count values into a running total as fast as you can, so you don't really keep track of the raw number of cards played), but I figured a rough estimate of the four Blackjacks being a 40 million to one shot.
But... there's probably millions of hands per day in Vegas, so I guess it had to happen somewhere.
You *get* the budget, or free it up from elsewhere, or get a small loan, and have it fixed PROPERLY by an experienced professional electrician with good references.
You will save yourself a lot of headaches downstream. There's a time to DIY and there's a time when experience is essential.
Think of it this way: if the wiring had been done properly before, you would not be having this problem now.
OK. I own PCs and Macs and use both. I've use Macs since System 5, and PCs since DOS. The PC is mainly for working from home when I'm not building actual hardware at work. The Mac is where I do creative things and day to day stuff like email and web browsing.
The Mac is just nicer to use. That's really all there is to it, and yes that's subjective I guess, although even the hardcore Windows fanatics I know admit the GUI is a mess. As for price differences, there really isn't that much of a gap if you compare equivalently equiped machines of comparable quality.
The quality factor is important. I built my own PC, for example, and would never bother with some $500 gray box. There really is no bargain basement Mac, but I don't think I'd want one anyway.
As an aside, I find it weird that there is so much quibbling over a couple bucks in the personal computer world. I know a guy at work who bought a $60,000 car and a $5000 plasma television, and then spent three weeks online to save $100 on a PC (he paid $500 instead of $600). I consider my time to be money, and the time saved using my Mac pays for any price gap easily within a month.
Oh, I've said for years that ideology is a mental illness that simply has yet to be recognized as such my the mental health community.
I had the epiphany in 1995 after reading a book on criminal profiling ("Mindhunter" by John Douglas- highly recommended), and then turning on a Sunday morning political wonk show. I realized there was little to no difference in the thought processes between a hard core ideologe and a serial killer. They both have minds that actively remanufacture reality as it occurs around them. It's like they have built little mini-Matrixes in their heads. They've pulled to wool down over their own eyes. I'm going to write a my own book on it when I retire.
No, its chief architect was DEMOCRAT Steve Peace. Look up his name on Google. He is now Gray Davis' right hand man, which explains a lot.
Not to defend the GOP, though. The "deregulation" (it wasn't, really. There was all sorts of bizarre price controls. Calling it deregulation was a propaganda myth.) was, in the end, a completely bipartisan clusterfook. But anyone using it to dump on one side or the other is just being pig ignorant and mentally ill.
I though backup power (battery, generator, some sort of big industrial UPS, whatever) for elevators was in the building codes for most places by now, even if it's just enough to get it to the nearest floor and open the doors. I haven't heard a "stuck in an elevator" story in years.
I don't have an ideology. I look at every issue- every instances of every issue- as an individual case.
My most common answer to common water-cooler policial questions is "It depends". People generally don't like to talk politics with me because I don't have pat answers into which I try to bludgen every real world case.
Yeah, because we all know ideology should be weakened or ignored as soon as it is inconvenient.
No, it should be criticized and then ignored when it is irrelevant. By "ideology" I mean exactly the stuff I mentioned in the two examples I gave. One boiled down to childish name calling, and the other intentionally lied to obfuscate an important issue. It's bullshit, and it's the prime factor in most of the misery that exists in the political arena. It seeks to do nothing but spark an emotional response rather than an intellectual one.
Ideologies are the enforcement of a cohesive paradigm irregardless of the facts or results of the individual. It is, by definition, inflexible and anti-reason in nature. In geek terms, it's the imposition of structured programming when an object oriented approach would be much better.
Maybe she will lose, and maybe I'm just a fringe guy myself, but I respect someone more for losing on principle than winning on wishy-washyness, whether or not I agree with their platform.
I actually am in full agreement with you here. But her stated views are based on appeals to emotionalism and are carefully worded to skirt the facts. SHE'S the one who is ignoring inconvenient facts (such as solar power/special interets example). There was nothing on her site I can't find on a thousand other politician's sites, from any part of the spectrum.
Actually, you should have more respect for my views, then.;-) I say, flat out and with full clarity, making California attractive to business is the number one issue to be faced, right here and right now. That view is based on general working principles developed over quite a number of years, observing the empirical data and current events, from studying history and coming to what I feel are rather inescapable conclusions. I do NOT voice them because I belong to some Party (I'm firmly independnet, and dislike all the big political Parties) which has these views as the Official Line.
I'm very serious. Nothing else matters unless you have the tax base to pay for all those pretty and feel-good programs. Without a healthy commercial and industrial sector, who do you tax? The citizens? Well, they're all out of work because all the businesses left. Now what? This is pretty basic stuff.
Business is only one aspect of life - it already holds too much power over our lives, IMHO.
Well, I didn't say it wasn't just one aspect- I said it was the most important when it comes to running an economy. Without it, nothing really else matters, because your state is *b*a*n*k*r*u*p*t*.
You're dragging in unrelated issues. This has nothing to do with the power of business over individuals, or prosecuting white collar crime, or privacy from the RIAA, or whatever it is you're alluding to here (I'm just guessing). It's simple economics. You have to make your state attractive to business, and you can do so in many ways without hurting the individual or trampling anyone else's rights. It's a vast and complicated issue, but not THAT difficult to navigate if you just keep your head about yourself.
Like I said, this automatic "business = evil" broad brush attitude has to stop, and, no, that does no mean allow businesses to commit crimes. It's one of the things that has led to the problems here in California. Davis and the Legislature either swung the balance pedulum to far against people trying to run businesses, or they favored the businesses that gave them the most money. You can argue these points, but they are all pretty well documented, even by media sources that are traditionally sympathetic to Democratic causes.
Whether you like Jack Kemp or not, he has a good spiel in which he describes how government is supposed to be the referee in the quest for balance between the public, commercial and private spheres. The problem too often is that the government has become the other team. In addition, the government controls the referees and can change the rulebook at will.
Would you be willing to sit down and discuss current advances in nuclear energy generation with established and recognized scientific leaders from the field (from both the power generation and waste handling sides of the technology) and experienced personel from France's nuclear energy system? All I ask is that you hear them out with an open mind.
Why do I see nothing prominent on your site about attracting business to California? Who do you think is going to build (or pay for) your 100 square miles of solar panels? To his credit, the FIRST thing Arnold talked about in his first post-announcement press conference was getting business back to California. If you are not willing to address this, nothing else matters.
It appears you might be in a segment of the political spectrum where you are duty bound to think of business as the Bad Guys, but I'd ask you to look beyond that. At least look for ways to attract smaller businesses which is where most of the job growth tends to occur anyway.
I'm afraid your statements have too much ideological content. For example, there are reasons OTHER than "special interests" that prevent wide adoption of solar energy. Some of them have a solid scientific and economic basis. And the crack about "Oh, do we want to be like Bush's Texas" was also silly.
A lot of us out here are really, really tired of that blame game nonsense. We don't want to hear California's woes blamed on Bush or 9/11 or El Nino or the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Argentina. What's done is done and now is now. What do you propose to FIX it?
A post where every statement is easily shown to be false with widely avaialble data, and it's modded up as insightful. C'mon SlashDot, y'all are better than this, surely. It's got to be a troll who got his buddies to mod him up or something.
I mean one of them doesn't even make sense. They aren't avoiding property taxes because they don't own property? That's a complete neutral. It's like praising children or renters or citizens of Bangladesh for not avoiding paying their California property taxes.
Well behaved as possible? Nearly 1/3 of drug trafficking arrests involve illegals. Personally I'd legalize the drugs, but don't trot out some sort of fantasy world of saintly illegals doing no wrong.
Don't cost anything? Talk to an emergency room employee some day. Talk to the overwhelmed government drones who investigate all the fraud the illegals commit.
Slashdot Mirror
There are some very good examples online if you search. The image stacking seems to reduce the effect of atmospheric turbulence. The effects of the air are always changing and so they tend to average out whereas your target (Mars in this case) will remain constant.
Here is a site that explains image stacking.
I think they even do this with Hubble imagery.
Another finishing trick is to snap some dark frames and subtract that out of the final image to remove effects of the image sensor itself.
Or maybe Target simply wasn't selling many to justify stocking them. Everyone I know buys their compact flourescents home improvement centers like Home Depot or Lowes simply because those places pretty much have every shape and style you might want.
I have a spiral buld porch light that is ten years old and still going with near nightly use.
*blink*
This is almost like hearing someone say, "Look at the sleek and sexy lines of that Honda Element."
Yeah. Car analogy. Deal with it.
I submit that "this movie sucked" is piss poor movie reviewing, and fully deserving of downward moderation. ;-)
But does it HAVE to suck? I think Plato asked that one first.
In fact, I'm thinking of starting a good misanthropy web site because I there doesn't seem to be any really good ones out there, although Maddox comes close sometimes.
Eh... I'd rather have the pocket atomic blasters from Foundation Trilogy. Or did I dream those?
Moderator note: Hey, I avoided the "I got yer big worm right here" line.
And it would be a hoot to see them build that 100 square mile array of solar panels. Get the illegal aliens to build it.
A big, glittering monument to Ideology and Madness visible from orbit.
Oh, my, we must build it, yes, we must.
This was a gabfest- a chatroom transcript.
Californians should find it frightening that a wealthy Republican can buy himself another election.
Well, some of us, while not Republicans, don't buy into the Big Evil Republican Bogeyman that the opposition trots out every 3 nanoseconds in lieu of actual thought or ideas.
And Issa dropped out, so what's your point? He could have spent $100 million and not gotten 2 million signatures if the sentiment for a recall did not exist. Some of us find it refreshing to see that voters can still flex a little muscle. See the Constitution Of California, Article II, Sections 13-20. The recall election process is built into the state Constitution as well as the state election codes.There were stringent numbers to be met for the recall effort. The recall has stood firm against several legal and media challenges.
As for Republicans, the recall is also endorsed by the Libertarians and the American Independents. In fact, many key Republicans have the stance that they should be focusing more on defeating Barbara Boxer or re-electing Bush in the next regular elections.
Ah, what's the point... She's just another ideologue without any real, workable solutions. Does humanity really have to suck this badly?
ObGamblingAnecdote: Winter of 1997. In town for CES. Horseshoe Casino, $25 single deck table. Me and three others playing at around 2am. Second deal after a new shuffle.
All four of us get Blackjacks.
I wasn't positive how many cards got dealt in the first hand after the shuffle (in a basic count system, you add or subtract their count values into a running total as fast as you can, so you don't really keep track of the raw number of cards played), but I figured a rough estimate of the four Blackjacks being a 40 million to one shot.
But... there's probably millions of hands per day in Vegas, so I guess it had to happen somewhere.
You will save yourself a lot of headaches downstream. There's a time to DIY and there's a time when experience is essential.
Think of it this way: if the wiring had been done properly before, you would not be having this problem now.
The Mac is just nicer to use. That's really all there is to it, and yes that's subjective I guess, although even the hardcore Windows fanatics I know admit the GUI is a mess. As for price differences, there really isn't that much of a gap if you compare equivalently equiped machines of comparable quality.
The quality factor is important. I built my own PC, for example, and would never bother with some $500 gray box. There really is no bargain basement Mac, but I don't think I'd want one anyway.
As an aside, I find it weird that there is so much quibbling over a couple bucks in the personal computer world. I know a guy at work who bought a $60,000 car and a $5000 plasma television, and then spent three weeks online to save $100 on a PC (he paid $500 instead of $600). I consider my time to be money, and the time saved using my Mac pays for any price gap easily within a month.
Nuff said. :-D
Or maybe this happened once before, and the current universe is the product of Strain 121 excrement.
Man, that's a really weird thought. Must be Friday.
Oh, I've said for years that ideology is a mental illness that simply has yet to be recognized as such my the mental health community.
I had the epiphany in 1995 after reading a book on criminal profiling ("Mindhunter" by John Douglas- highly recommended), and then turning on a Sunday morning political wonk show. I realized there was little to no difference in the thought processes between a hard core ideologe and a serial killer. They both have minds that actively remanufacture reality as it occurs around them. It's like they have built little mini-Matrixes in their heads. They've pulled to wool down over their own eyes. I'm going to write a my own book on it when I retire.
Not to defend the GOP, though. The "deregulation" (it wasn't, really. There was all sorts of bizarre price controls. Calling it deregulation was a propaganda myth.) was, in the end, a completely bipartisan clusterfook. But anyone using it to dump on one side or the other is just being pig ignorant and mentally ill.
I though backup power (battery, generator, some sort of big industrial UPS, whatever) for elevators was in the building codes for most places by now, even if it's just enough to get it to the nearest floor and open the doors. I haven't heard a "stuck in an elevator" story in years.
Mayor Of Los Angeles: Hello?
Voice On Phone: This is NASA! You're about to have-
(Five minutes of rumbling, cracking and breaking glass and then silence).
My most common answer to common water-cooler policial questions is "It depends". People generally don't like to talk politics with me because I don't have pat answers into which I try to bludgen every real world case.
There's no magic button. Thanks for that news flash.
No, it should be criticized and then ignored when it is irrelevant. By "ideology" I mean exactly the stuff I mentioned in the two examples I gave. One boiled down to childish name calling, and the other intentionally lied to obfuscate an important issue. It's bullshit, and it's the prime factor in most of the misery that exists in the political arena. It seeks to do nothing but spark an emotional response rather than an intellectual one.
Ideologies are the enforcement of a cohesive paradigm irregardless of the facts or results of the individual. It is, by definition, inflexible and anti-reason in nature. In geek terms, it's the imposition of structured programming when an object oriented approach would be much better.
Maybe she will lose, and maybe I'm just a fringe guy myself, but I respect someone more for losing on principle than winning on wishy-washyness, whether or not I agree with their platform.
I actually am in full agreement with you here. But her stated views are based on appeals to emotionalism and are carefully worded to skirt the facts. SHE'S the one who is ignoring inconvenient facts (such as solar power/special interets example). There was nothing on her site I can't find on a thousand other politician's sites, from any part of the spectrum.
Actually, you should have more respect for my views, then. ;-) I say, flat out and with full clarity, making California attractive to business is the number one issue to be faced, right here and right now. That view is based on general working principles developed over quite a number of years, observing the empirical data and current events, from studying history and coming to what I feel are rather inescapable conclusions. I do NOT voice them because I belong to some Party (I'm firmly independnet, and dislike all the big political Parties) which has these views as the Official Line.
I'm very serious. Nothing else matters unless you have the tax base to pay for all those pretty and feel-good programs. Without a healthy commercial and industrial sector, who do you tax? The citizens? Well, they're all out of work because all the businesses left. Now what? This is pretty basic stuff.
Business is only one aspect of life - it already holds too much power over our lives, IMHO.
Well, I didn't say it wasn't just one aspect- I said it was the most important when it comes to running an economy. Without it, nothing really else matters, because your state is *b*a*n*k*r*u*p*t*.
You're dragging in unrelated issues. This has nothing to do with the power of business over individuals, or prosecuting white collar crime, or privacy from the RIAA, or whatever it is you're alluding to here (I'm just guessing). It's simple economics. You have to make your state attractive to business, and you can do so in many ways without hurting the individual or trampling anyone else's rights. It's a vast and complicated issue, but not THAT difficult to navigate if you just keep your head about yourself.
Like I said, this automatic "business = evil" broad brush attitude has to stop, and, no, that does no mean allow businesses to commit crimes. It's one of the things that has led to the problems here in California. Davis and the Legislature either swung the balance pedulum to far against people trying to run businesses, or they favored the businesses that gave them the most money. You can argue these points, but they are all pretty well documented, even by media sources that are traditionally sympathetic to Democratic causes.
Whether you like Jack Kemp or not, he has a good spiel in which he describes how government is supposed to be the referee in the quest for balance between the public, commercial and private spheres. The problem too often is that the government has become the other team. In addition, the government controls the referees and can change the rulebook at will.
Would you be willing to sit down and discuss current advances in nuclear energy generation with established and recognized scientific leaders from the field (from both the power generation and waste handling sides of the technology) and experienced personel from France's nuclear energy system? All I ask is that you hear them out with an open mind.
It appears you might be in a segment of the political spectrum where you are duty bound to think of business as the Bad Guys, but I'd ask you to look beyond that. At least look for ways to attract smaller businesses which is where most of the job growth tends to occur anyway.
I'm afraid your statements have too much ideological content. For example, there are reasons OTHER than "special interests" that prevent wide adoption of solar energy. Some of them have a solid scientific and economic basis. And the crack about "Oh, do we want to be like Bush's Texas" was also silly.
A lot of us out here are really, really tired of that blame game nonsense. We don't want to hear California's woes blamed on Bush or 9/11 or El Nino or the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Argentina. What's done is done and now is now. What do you propose to FIX it?
I mean one of them doesn't even make sense. They aren't avoiding property taxes because they don't own property? That's a complete neutral. It's like praising children or renters or citizens of Bangladesh for not avoiding paying their California property taxes.
Well behaved as possible? Nearly 1/3 of drug trafficking arrests involve illegals. Personally I'd legalize the drugs, but don't trot out some sort of fantasy world of saintly illegals doing no wrong.
Don't cost anything? Talk to an emergency room employee some day. Talk to the overwhelmed government drones who investigate all the fraud the illegals commit.
You gotta be a troll...