I almost had Lasik, but opted for a new Mac instead. My reasoning:
1) I have a high degree of astigmatism, which often (according to all the waivers they ask you to sign before surgery) needs more than one surgery to correct. People who had more than one surgery were more likely to experience poor night vision and other problems.
2) You can replace a bad pair of contacts, but side effects are forever.
3) There have been no studies on the long-term effects of all of this.
4) Since wearing contacts, my prescription has changed many times. I know my vision will alter again as I age. But the changes to my cornea will be permanent. 4000 dollars later, I will still need glasses.
5) As far as I can tell, my contacts only prevent me from skuba diving and responding to a sudden attack in the middle of the night. Since I live nowhere near an ocean, and would most likely die in a knife fight, I feel my lifestyle is not seriously compromised.
6) Sometimes 20/20 vision is an ugly thing.My uncorrected eyes are better than beer goggles.
Actually, many celebrities are excellent pilots. Harrison Ford is a very capable helicopter pilot (no mean feat, to earn that license). Michael Dorn flies an F-86 sabre, which is most certainly not a plane for amateurs. Patrick Swayze managed to make a successful forced landing of a twin engine plane in a residential neighborhood AT NIGHT when his plane suffered engine trouble.
Kennedy, Jr made a poor judgement call in pre-flight planning known as "get-there-itis", which resulted in him finding himself over water at night in low visibility conditions...a recipe for trouble for even some of the best pilots. There is no discernable horizon in such conditions, and despite what should have been adequate instrument training, he managed to get into a death spiral (a rapidly accelerating diving spiral, normally aggravated by panicked attempts to pull out of it). We can really only hypothesize what went wrong, but a lot of things could have, and for a pilot without a great deal of experience flying IFR, it would've taken only a few seconds to die. It could've happened to a lot of pilots.
John Denver was flying low over the water when, it has been theorized, he reached for an awkwardly placed fuel selector and inadvertantly put in a spurious control input (probably rudder)...resulting in the plane unexpectedly changing attitude enough to strike the water. Planes and water are often a fatal combination.
I think people hear about celebrity deaths in airplanes more often than other people simply because celebrities are more likely to be flying them (or flying in them) in the first place. They travel large distances a lot and they can afford to fly them.
That's true, but Nigeria is alsoa country where people will deliberately block your car while a grease monkey crawls under it and wrecks your transmission...coincidently just a block down the street from a repair shop. (Source: The World's Most Dangerous Places)
Nigeria is a cesspool of lawlessness and violence. Stereotyping isn't always fair, but it may just save your life.
Video is more likely to replace mainstream novels than comic books.
More people watch TV than read (sadly), and given another decade or two, we should all start having a very portable way to view video directly from the net.
I think comics may well be supplanted by home-brewed animation. A technically literate illustrator can create his own animated short in about the same amount of time as it once took to complete a monthly comic, using today's tools. As the tools evolve, it may become even easier. (Right now, programmers still don't seem to fully grasp what it is artists need from their tools. But more and more traditional artists are finally beginning to cross over into the digital medium, so I expect they will make themselves heard, and the tools...and the content... will improve.) We are also seeing more and more hybrid electronic formats, which look less like comics and more like animation all the time.
Forget dead trees. We will all be publishing ourselves electronically before long.
The benefits are not always obvious, and sometimes the only benefit is more accumulated knowledge. But accumulating knowledge through exploration has, in the past, led to discovering new continents, new natural resources, new technologies that DO dramatically alter everyone's lifestyles (for good or ill) and even new religions. (Not much hope for a pantheon of weather gods once you understand the basics of meterology. Science can and does alter the way people think about the universe.)
For an excellent discussion of just how often seemingly obscure scientific discoveries can and do impact world events, I highly recommend perusing a copy of Isaac Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery. It really puts the impact of science and research on human history into focus.
I think we are beginning to run afoul of the Law of Diminishing Returns. Is it really worth expending thousands of man hours and even more clock cycles on a lifelike 3-D approximation of a real person, when there are billions of very real people wandering around the planet looking for work? Just film them and digitally insert them. It takes whole teams of artisans and programmers months to build one that is only 99% human...and they still normally need an actor to lend voice, motion and personality to their digital automaton. After a point, you have to ask yourself: is this really neccessary? Can I tell the story or play the game without going to these lengths?
I am sure the suits in Hollywood would love nothing better than to own their very own CGI Brittany Spears, complete with the little "TM" tatooed on her butt, but I doubt it will ever be cost effective. And the audience will probably still know.
I recently read a book by Ray Harryhausen, who mentioned that his goal was never to make anything look TOO real...because it would lose the dream-like quality that makes fantasy appealling. I tend to concur.
Hasn't anyone else noticed that the live-action versions of beloved childhood cartoons almost always flop? I personally found the live action Grinch to be REALLY disturbing. Disney's Dinosaur sent kids screaming out of the theatre with it's "realism". The rubber-suited, miniature-stomping Godzilla handily outgrosses the made in America, ultra-real CGI version.
3-D CGI has some marvelous cinematic uses, but it is often taken too far. Half of art is knowing when to stop...
Are we people with our own opinions, or are we choosing sides for the rumble after dark?
Lighten up, guys.
Look to the men, not the party. There are good and bad Republicans, and good and bad Democrats. There are both men of conscience in politics, and greedy, power-hungry monsters.
Keep your ears and minds open, and maybe the next time you go to the polls you'll find that there is hope for this nation, after all.
This is probably not the best place to get useful information regarding your sister's condition.
I havea good friend who was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia. I always just thought he was a little weird, but his weirdness grew progressively worse as he got older, culminating in some pretty strange episodes which finally got him the medical help he needed.
He spends his time playing prescription roulette now. Sometimes he's lucid, other times he is way out there. He's still generally weird.
He's still my friend.
Living with mentally handicapped loved ones is not easy. You have a hard road ahead. But you are not alone on that road, although it can feel like it at times. Don't be afraid to reach out for help.
And learn as much as you can. There are a lot of assholes out there who like to profit from other's misery by peddling the cure of the week.
There seems to be an underlying assumption by a lot of guys here that Episodes 1 and 2 were enjoyable only by children under 10.
Wrong.
I have two hardcore Star Wars fans aged 7 and 8, and they hated those movies. They hated the plodding plotlines, the goofy looking spaceships and the crappy merchandising that resulted.
See for yourself. Go to a toy store. Tons of Episode 1 and 2 toys in the clearance bin. X-Wings still selling strong.
The only redeeming qualities they seemed to find in the new movies was the Pod Race (which the movie bent painfully over backwards to somehow turn into a plot point) and, sadly, Jar-Jar Binks, who young children find amusing and will even take great pains (yours) to imitate. Although they still want to be Darth Vader on Halloween.
The latter day episodes just plain suck. Even kids will tell you that.
So far, the historical record has shown that the most efficient killers on the planet tend to be at the top of the food chain here on Earth. Morality is just something we talk about when we're not waging war.
Not to be contrary or anything, but do we really need to save any more lives? There are six billion of us now, and we are multiplying at an exponential rate. Clearly, we're pretty dang safe. TOO safe, really. Almost every major problem on this planet can be traced back to overpopulation: war, famine, pollution, stress...cripes, if you want to make the world a better place, let a little Darwinism back into the picture.
The only people interested in "saving lives" are the insurance companies, because death is bad for business.
But it's good for the planet.
Choose death.
Otherwise we're going to find ourselves on a planet of twenty billion people, every one of which insists on having a car, an opinion, and the unalienable right to a low paying job watching trees on some misguided park ranger's safety cam.
I completely agree. If some moron breaks a window, you don't blame the windowmaker.
Sadly, though, people still insist upon hounding the easy target. Look at the plight of the tobacco companies. I smoked for ten years, and let me tell you: I never met a smoker who did not know that smoking was bad for them, even potentially fatal. Unfortunately, once they've succumbed to the big C, their survivinng heirs go nuts and sue everyone remotely connected with their deaths.
This is true in aviation, too...half the price of a new plane just covers the manufacturer's liability insurance. Surviving heirs seem to insist upon driving another nail into their dead spouses' favorite hobby whenever the poor slob augers in.
How the gun companies have managed to, ahem, dodge the bullet in this regard so long is beyond me.
Anyway, I think it's obvious that you cannot have a completely secure OS unless you bury it in a box somewhere and don't let it talk to anybody. Fat lot of good it would do anyone then.
String the little vandals up, they deserve it. I think most of these little punks do it for the power trip, anyway (Dude, we shut down the Eastern Seaboard power grid, huh, huh). Let them have a little taste of the responsibility that comes with power.
Maybe we could lock them in a little room with a bunch of REAL worms...
From what I've read about, I think you have it backwards: PNG's DO possess the ability to save the gamma of the authoring device. Unfortunately, it is up to renderer to correctly compensate for the gamma differences (assuming the authoring software got it right in the first place), which it often fails to do.
The effect is the same, though: inconsistent gamma among different browsers.
That's interesting. I often wonder why camera manufacturers chose JPEG for a format. It always seemed to me like a rotten choice for what will presumably be an archival image. But I guess they were really more interested in color accuracy. Makes sense.
Not that I understood a tenth of what you just said, but it's reassuring to know that they had a reason:-)
A little clarification: PNG is actually a very nice substitute for JPEG's (especially the way JPEG's are currently being abused). It's single shortcoming in comparison to JPEG is that it does not compress to as small a size. JPEG is still a better choice for the web, for this reason, but PNG beats it hands down in other roles.
I've been working as a designer for over ten years (I started back when it used to require a degree, not just a computer). It's been my experience that JPEG is one of the most abused graphic file formats in general. It is good for the web...it's intended purpose...but it is awful for everything else. Unfortunately, everyone insists on using it for everything else...printing, digital cameras, stock art...all apparently blissfully unaware that this LOSSY algorithm is slowly but surely leeching the color data from their pictures every single time they save them. The result: Precious memories that print with muddy colors, photos with ugly artifacts in them, and unhappy designers who have to explain to their clients why there is no Photoshop cure for being a moron.
PNG's are great. They support multiple levels of alpha transparency, retain all their data, and compress even photos very well. They are a much better option for a multi-purpose format. (They would be even better if M$ would get off their collective asses and implement them properly in IE. Currently, IE treats them as if they have only one level of transparency) JPEG's can still be smaller, at the expense of quality, but broadband may eventually make that moot. I fear we will all still be using JPEG's even then, though.
I've seen video games still using the PCX format, which is a crap format if ever their was one. Old formats die hard.
Do yourselves a favor: Use JPEG's on the web if you want, but archive your pictures with another format, like PNG, TIFF or Photoshop (PSD). CMYK images need to be saved as TIFF's or PSD's...ironically, the proprietary PSD is probably more universal.
This is true. In fact, it is true of electronics, too. I once watched a documentary about a bunch of guys who bought two retired schoolbuses, loaded them up with old junk radios, TV's, computers, etc and drove them down to Central/South America (an adventure in itself) and then sold it all...including the buses. They then bought plane tickets, flew back top the States, and started bus shopping again.
A search engine from the website that has one of the worst website search engines ever? Hmmm. Have you searched for a book on Amazon lately, since they've "upgraded" their search engine? It not only searches authors, keywords and titles...it also searches every blessed word of every book in the inventory. Result? Any given search will return a zillion results, about five of which might be useful.
Slashdot Mirror
...this trailer for a film that celebrates the freedom of speech in a BIG way has so much DRM that I cannot even save it to my hard drive.
Why? Are they afraid I might promote their film without their permission?
They must have read their reviews...
And yet, millions of people have seen it. Strange, eh?
Strike one up for public domain...
U.S. smart bomb kills 98, remaining 2 survivors given Nike t-shirts and jobs at new local oil refinery.
Go team!
The way corporate Amerika is screwing with the environment, that population crash shouldn't be long in coming...
...that optometrists always seem to wear glasses?
I almost had Lasik, but opted for a new Mac instead. My reasoning:
1) I have a high degree of astigmatism, which often (according to all the waivers they ask you to sign before surgery) needs more than one surgery to correct. People who had more than one surgery were more likely to experience poor night vision and other problems.
2) You can replace a bad pair of contacts, but side effects are forever.
3) There have been no studies on the long-term effects of all of this.
4) Since wearing contacts, my prescription has changed many times. I know my vision will alter again as I age. But the changes to my cornea will be permanent. 4000 dollars later, I will still need glasses.
5) As far as I can tell, my contacts only prevent me from skuba diving and responding to a sudden attack in the middle of the night. Since I live nowhere near an ocean, and would most likely die in a knife fight, I feel my lifestyle is not seriously compromised.
6) Sometimes 20/20 vision is an ugly thing.My uncorrected eyes are better than beer goggles.
7) Hey, new Mac.
Actually, many celebrities are excellent pilots. Harrison Ford is a very capable helicopter pilot (no mean feat, to earn that license). Michael Dorn flies an F-86 sabre, which is most certainly not a plane for amateurs. Patrick Swayze managed to make a successful forced landing of a twin engine plane in a residential neighborhood AT NIGHT when his plane suffered engine trouble.
Kennedy, Jr made a poor judgement call in pre-flight planning known as "get-there-itis", which resulted in him finding himself over water at night in low visibility conditions...a recipe for trouble for even some of the best pilots. There is no discernable horizon in such conditions, and despite what should have been adequate instrument training, he managed to get into a death spiral (a rapidly accelerating diving spiral, normally aggravated by panicked attempts to pull out of it). We can really only hypothesize what went wrong, but a lot of things could have, and for a pilot without a great deal of experience flying IFR, it would've taken only a few seconds to die. It could've happened to a lot of pilots.
John Denver was flying low over the water when, it has been theorized, he reached for an awkwardly placed fuel selector and inadvertantly put in a spurious control input (probably rudder)...resulting in the plane unexpectedly changing attitude enough to strike the water. Planes and water are often a fatal combination.
I think people hear about celebrity deaths in airplanes more often than other people simply because celebrities are more likely to be flying them (or flying in them) in the first place. They travel large distances a lot and they can afford to fly them.
That's true, but Nigeria is alsoa country where people will deliberately block your car while a grease monkey crawls under it and wrecks your transmission...coincidently just a block down the street from a repair shop. (Source: The World's Most Dangerous Places)
Nigeria is a cesspool of lawlessness and violence. Stereotyping isn't always fair, but it may just save your life.
Fuck.
Video is more likely to replace mainstream novels than comic books.
More people watch TV than read (sadly), and given another decade or two, we should all start having a very portable way to view video directly from the net.
I think comics may well be supplanted by home-brewed animation. A technically literate illustrator can create his own animated short in about the same amount of time as it once took to complete a monthly comic, using today's tools. As the tools evolve, it may become even easier. (Right now, programmers still don't seem to fully grasp what it is artists need from their tools. But more and more traditional artists are finally beginning to cross over into the digital medium, so I expect they will make themselves heard, and the tools...and the content... will improve.) We are also seeing more and more hybrid electronic formats, which look less like comics and more like animation all the time.
Forget dead trees. We will all be publishing ourselves electronically before long.
The benefits are not always obvious, and sometimes the only benefit is more accumulated knowledge. But accumulating knowledge through exploration has, in the past, led to discovering new continents, new natural resources, new technologies that DO dramatically alter everyone's lifestyles (for good or ill) and even new religions. (Not much hope for a pantheon of weather gods once you understand the basics of meterology. Science can and does alter the way people think about the universe.)
For an excellent discussion of just how often seemingly obscure scientific discoveries can and do impact world events, I highly recommend perusing a copy of Isaac Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery. It really puts the impact of science and research on human history into focus.
I think we are beginning to run afoul of the Law of Diminishing Returns. Is it really worth expending thousands of man hours and even more clock cycles on a lifelike 3-D approximation of a real person, when there are billions of very real people wandering around the planet looking for work? Just film them and digitally insert them. It takes whole teams of artisans and programmers months to build one that is only 99% human...and they still normally need an actor to lend voice, motion and personality to their digital automaton. After a point, you have to ask yourself: is this really neccessary? Can I tell the story or play the game without going to these lengths?
I am sure the suits in Hollywood would love nothing better than to own their very own CGI Brittany Spears, complete with the little "TM" tatooed on her butt, but I doubt it will ever be cost effective. And the audience will probably still know.
I recently read a book by Ray Harryhausen, who mentioned that his goal was never to make anything look TOO real...because it would lose the dream-like quality that makes fantasy appealling. I tend to concur.
Hasn't anyone else noticed that the live-action versions of beloved childhood cartoons almost always flop? I personally found the live action Grinch to be REALLY disturbing. Disney's Dinosaur sent kids screaming out of the theatre with it's "realism". The rubber-suited, miniature-stomping Godzilla handily outgrosses the made in America, ultra-real CGI version.
3-D CGI has some marvelous cinematic uses, but it is often taken too far. Half of art is knowing when to stop...
Before you know it, their cartoon characters will start having lips and noses...oh, the horror.
Amen to that.
Are we people with our own opinions, or are we choosing sides for the rumble after dark?
Lighten up, guys.
Look to the men, not the party. There are good and bad Republicans, and good and bad Democrats. There are both men of conscience in politics, and greedy, power-hungry monsters.
Keep your ears and minds open, and maybe the next time you go to the polls you'll find that there is hope for this nation, after all.
This is probably not the best place to get useful information regarding your sister's condition.
I havea good friend who was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia. I always just thought he was a little weird, but his weirdness grew progressively worse as he got older, culminating in some pretty strange episodes which finally got him the medical help he needed.
He spends his time playing prescription roulette now. Sometimes he's lucid, other times he is way out there. He's still generally weird.
He's still my friend.
Living with mentally handicapped loved ones is not easy. You have a hard road ahead. But you are not alone on that road, although it can feel like it at times. Don't be afraid to reach out for help.
And learn as much as you can. There are a lot of assholes out there who like to profit from other's misery by peddling the cure of the week.
There seems to be an underlying assumption by a lot of guys here that Episodes 1 and 2 were enjoyable only by children under 10.
Wrong.
I have two hardcore Star Wars fans aged 7 and 8, and they hated those movies. They hated the plodding plotlines, the goofy looking spaceships and the crappy merchandising that resulted.
See for yourself. Go to a toy store. Tons of Episode 1 and 2 toys in the clearance bin. X-Wings still selling strong.
The only redeeming qualities they seemed to find in the new movies was the Pod Race (which the movie bent painfully over backwards to somehow turn into a plot point) and, sadly, Jar-Jar Binks, who young children find amusing and will even take great pains (yours) to imitate. Although they still want to be Darth Vader on Halloween.
The latter day episodes just plain suck. Even kids will tell you that.
Good point.
So far, the historical record has shown that the most efficient killers on the planet tend to be at the top of the food chain here on Earth. Morality is just something we talk about when we're not waging war.
I wouldn't be in such a hurry to find ET...
Not to be contrary or anything, but do we really need to save any more lives? There are six billion of us now, and we are multiplying at an exponential rate. Clearly, we're pretty dang safe. TOO safe, really. Almost every major problem on this planet can be traced back to overpopulation: war, famine, pollution, stress...cripes, if you want to make the world a better place, let a little Darwinism back into the picture.
The only people interested in "saving lives" are the insurance companies, because death is bad for business.
But it's good for the planet.
Choose death.
Otherwise we're going to find ourselves on a planet of twenty billion people, every one of which insists on having a car, an opinion, and the unalienable right to a low paying job watching trees on some misguided park ranger's safety cam.
I completely agree. If some moron breaks a window, you don't blame the windowmaker.
Sadly, though, people still insist upon hounding the easy target. Look at the plight of the tobacco companies. I smoked for ten years, and let me tell you: I never met a smoker who did not know that smoking was bad for them, even potentially fatal. Unfortunately, once they've succumbed to the big C, their survivinng heirs go nuts and sue everyone remotely connected with their deaths.
This is true in aviation, too...half the price of a new plane just covers the manufacturer's liability insurance. Surviving heirs seem to insist upon driving another nail into their dead spouses' favorite hobby whenever the poor slob augers in.
How the gun companies have managed to, ahem, dodge the bullet in this regard so long is beyond me.
Anyway, I think it's obvious that you cannot have a completely secure OS unless you bury it in a box somewhere and don't let it talk to anybody. Fat lot of good it would do anyone then.
String the little vandals up, they deserve it. I think most of these little punks do it for the power trip, anyway (Dude, we shut down the Eastern Seaboard power grid, huh, huh). Let them have a little taste of the responsibility that comes with power.
Maybe we could lock them in a little room with a bunch of REAL worms...
I'm glad people are shocked. I was shocked. When people stop being shocked by this sort of thing, we really are in trouble...
From what I've read about, I think you have it backwards: PNG's DO possess the ability to save the gamma of the authoring device. Unfortunately, it is up to renderer to correctly compensate for the gamma differences (assuming the authoring software got it right in the first place), which it often fails to do.
The effect is the same, though: inconsistent gamma among different browsers.
Good observation.
That's interesting. I often wonder why camera manufacturers chose JPEG for a format. It always seemed to me like a rotten choice for what will presumably be an archival image. But I guess they were really more interested in color accuracy. Makes sense.
:-)
Not that I understood a tenth of what you just said, but it's reassuring to know that they had a reason
A little clarification: PNG is actually a very nice substitute for JPEG's (especially the way JPEG's are currently being abused). It's single shortcoming in comparison to JPEG is that it does not compress to as small a size. JPEG is still a better choice for the web, for this reason, but PNG beats it hands down in other roles.
I've been working as a designer for over ten years (I started back when it used to require a degree, not just a computer). It's been my experience that JPEG is one of the most abused graphic file formats in general. It is good for the web...it's intended purpose...but it is awful for everything else. Unfortunately, everyone insists on using it for everything else...printing, digital cameras, stock art...all apparently blissfully unaware that this LOSSY algorithm is slowly but surely leeching the color data from their pictures every single time they save them. The result: Precious memories that print with muddy colors, photos with ugly artifacts in them, and unhappy designers who have to explain to their clients why there is no Photoshop cure for being a moron.
PNG's are great. They support multiple levels of alpha transparency, retain all their data, and compress even photos very well. They are a much better option for a multi-purpose format. (They would be even better if M$ would get off their collective asses and implement them properly in IE. Currently, IE treats them as if they have only one level of transparency)
JPEG's can still be smaller, at the expense of quality, but broadband may eventually make that moot. I fear we will all still be using JPEG's even then, though.
I've seen video games still using the PCX format, which is a crap format if ever their was one. Old formats die hard.
Do yourselves a favor: Use JPEG's on the web if you want, but archive your pictures with another format, like PNG, TIFF or Photoshop (PSD). CMYK images need to be saved as TIFF's or PSD's...ironically, the proprietary PSD is probably more universal.
This is true. In fact, it is true of electronics, too. I once watched a documentary about a bunch of guys who bought two retired schoolbuses, loaded them up with old junk radios, TV's, computers, etc and drove them down to Central/South America (an adventure in itself) and then sold it all...including the buses. They then bought plane tickets, flew back top the States, and started bus shopping again.
One man's trash is another man's treasure.
A search engine from the website that has one of the worst website search engines ever? Hmmm. Have you searched for a book on Amazon lately, since they've "upgraded" their search engine? It not only searches authors, keywords and titles...it also searches every blessed word of every book in the inventory. Result? Any given search will return a zillion results, about five of which might be useful.
Think I'll stick with Google.