He-he, that's funny -- it desribes my wife too well. Every time I go to put food in there, the huge pack of Velvia and color infrared film is in my away. It's been like that since we got married. I keep telling her to switch completely to digital and she tells me I don't know what I am talking about, she is probably right...
You have a better choice -- Lenses!. Buy an SLR, (I got a Pentax K10D - beautiful camera) and a fast (f/1.4) normal (50mm) lens. A fast lens makes a lot of difference. Remember just going from one aperture stop to the next lower one _doubles_ the amount of light. With a fast lense you can now capture detail in the low ligth without needing a tripod.
Beware though, as you stray away from the sweet 50mm focal length you will pay astronomical prices for fast lenses...
Keep shooting at ISO 80. De-noising will not add details, it will hide the noise pixeles with uniform colors but it will only guess. The only way to fill in those pixels with correct information is to shoot the scene at the correct ISO setting.
The lower ISO you can get the more detail you could capture given that other parameters are fixed. Have you ever shot with Velvia ISO 50 film? -- it creates stunning details. I think Fujifilm discontinued it last year or so. In film the lower the ISO the finer the grain. As far as digital is concerned think of ISO as sensitivity of the CCD. You can turn the gain up to ISO 3200 but you will amplify a lot of noise too.
Have you heard of the expression "drunken trees"? Well it is about time then
2) How many "cities" are built on permafrost?
Quite a few apparently. Not talking about New York type metropolis centers but still, when you add all those little villages and towns, that's quite a few inhabitants. Try driving on a road that used to be permafrost and now it is melted, that should be fun.
Have you heard of Dowson city? Well here it is then.
This applies even more so to Siberia probably, it's just that we don't hear about it in the American media as much. It is understandable that our scientists and journalists are concerned with our continent first. I was surprised when Slashdot picked up a story about Siberia here
After replying to the grandchild of the original aritcle the meaning was completely lost. The point was that if humans are indeed responsible for global warming and can prevent it by altering their activity they should do so. Then the person I replied to said that we _should not_ do anything because warming is desirable so that people would feel better. My point was that accelerated warming of certain regions such as ones containing permafrost will be desastrous to the local landscapes, species of animals and humans.
Russia, China, and Canada were all MUCH warmer at one point, as well as a LOT colder. Expecting it to stay as it is now is a bit extreme...
Again, you have missed the point of the discussion, please read the _whole_ path through this thread, starting with the original article. I never said that everything should stay the same. I said that humans should not alter an ecosystem like that of the tundra. Can humans alter ecosystems in a very radical way? -- Well I don't think I need to answer that question...
Wrong, wrong, wrong. First melting permafrost is a huge problem. Whole landscapes will change. Large trees that have been growing for centuries will simply fall down. Cities built on permafrost will end up in a marsh. Animal species adapted to live in the permafrost will die. Second, earth's ecosystem is not composed of isolated regions, where you can arbitrarily change the temperature in one and expect to have no change for the rest of the system. A warm Canada, Russia and China will probably mean a very warm equator and a submerged LA and NY. It would be an interesting world for a sci-fi book but not a reality I would want to live in or have my children live in.
Besides, if the people in Canada can't stand the heat, let them move to Mexico. That would be easier probably than waiting for the polar ice to melt, just so 10,000,000 people can switch to wearing light jackets instead of thick winter clothes.
This all started with Google's claim of "do not evil". Sure, it sounds nice, except that we don't clearly know what "evil" means. In this context it seems to mean that "making a legal profit" is "evil". So in that respect Google is "evil". Except that I don't agree with this particular definition of "evil". In other words, my "evil" is not necessarily your "evil". Because I am sure the Irish don't mind at all having Google report all the profit in their country. So what is "evil" for us, all of the sudden is "good" for the people "across the pond".
It would have been much better from the PR point of view for Google to not make such "moral" claims. Every company is doing the same accounting trick but they never used such words as "evil" and "good" in their company's mission statement and therefore they don't suffer from this kind of criticism and controversy.
Usually it is very smart to manipulate such vague moral terms for one's benefit. Here is the algorithm:
Step 1: Claim that "I will do no evil" .
Step 2: As you go along, redifine what "evil" means" to match your actions.
Step 3: Go to Step 1.
Pretty easy algorithm -- nice and sweet.
It is true though... If you ask many of the serial killers or cruel dictators how they rate themselves, they would probably say that they are basically "good people". Of course, they have heavily modified what "good" means. These are extreme examples but this algorithm is essentially the same and it is used often by governments, individuals, religions, and _yes_ companies too.
Re:slightly off-topic - general post on AI
on
Marvin Minsky On AI
·
· Score: 1
Creating Artifical Intelligence that can pass the Turing Test which in turn leads towards emulating Human Intelligence
Turing Test is just one possible goal of AI. In general when experts talk about AI they mean 4 different things:
1.AI::system that acts like humans 2.AI::system that thinks like humans 3.AI::system that acts rationally 4.AI::system that thinks rationally
So Turing test will only test (1). That would be very nice, but perhaps we really wanted to build (4)? In other words, every time AI is mentioned, it has to be qualified _which_ AI they are talking about...
By the way, in order to 'store' human intelligence it might be necessary to accomplish (2). The problem with (2) is that we don't know how humans think. We can see the results of our actions, which a Turing Test would use, but we still don't completely know how we know, how we encode information, how we store it and so on. So forget about (2) for a while...
I did, and therefore since all life is precious, we decided to stop using live mice at our heart research laboratory and switched to live humans. In order to save countless of rodents that we kill every month, I invite you to take their place. As you say, we are all one, so in studing _human_ heart disease we would rather prefer to work with humans. Give me you address and phone number so we can invite you to our lab, aneasthesize you, then cut your heart out and attach it to a machine and pump artificial blood and drugs through it.
Yes, I actually do work in such a lab...
Yes, the lab is _not_ in China, Afghanistan, or some other "terrorist laden country", we are right here in the heartland (pun intended) of America, right in your backyard. It will make it really convinent for to come to us.
not very far from what the Nazi KZ Doctors did to the people captured in the camps
Nazi KZ Doctors???
Pigeons are not people....
Repeat that a couple of times, please, perhaps it will sink in.
A lot of this un-ethical kind of stuff is going on in your backyard university lab probably, it's just not in the news. Russians tried to do the same with dolphins and other animals, Israelis do this with monkeys (see hear ). You should go tour your local pig farm and see how those animals are treated.
Just because these are Chinese scientists, i.e. foreigners (and of course, probably commie terrorists, right?) that we are all appalled.
So what do you choose? Be a world's policeman or not?
As for USA is a westernized Judeo-Christian nation.
This will probably you'll get you started:
Russia is just as much a Judeo-Christian nation (you'd be surprized that most Russians are not Communists but rather identify themselves as Orthodox Christians, in effect "more" Christians than our Protestants, but you wouldn't know that because it is not taught in the World Studies class in highschool), yet that doesn't prevent us from thinking of Russians as pseudo-rivals. And, Israel today is just as Christian as Iran. So even if there was any validity in "we like them because they have the same religion" your argument would not hold.
Support also includes training in tactics and strategy. We might not have given bin-Laden bazookas personally, but we did train them.
There are interviews conducted with ex CIA agents who admit shipping rocket launchers to the Moujahadin. Now, if CIA shipped them rocket launchers, don't you think they gave them a tip or two about how to use them. Remember the Moujas were trained by us to fight an organized army, and now the same Moujas are fighting another organized army, ours and our alies.
All they would need to do is make a phone call to someone in the US and tell them how they are going to smuggle the bomb in
Small suit-case nuclear bombs exist already, as soon as Iran could develop one, the Russians could detonate one of theirs in NY city because then Iran could be blamed. While U.S. goes to war with Iran, Russia uses the time to strengthen it's political position. Today, Russia is starting to 'dream' again about world domination. Putin already acknowledges that U.S.'s interests are starting to clash with their state interests in Europe. If they could support the Taliban, Iran or the Moujahedin without us noticing, they would!
I don't give a shit about one pissant ME country wanting to destroy another pissant ME country.
but then you say
...if Iran attacks Israel, THEN we can get involved.
Why get involved then if Israel is just another pissant ME country? You don't want to be the world's policeman but then you want to be the world policeman. You have to get your act straight.
Let's assume that you want to be the world's policeman:
Then it is a million times easier to police by _preventing_ the problems. Don't act when the countries already burned themselves to the ground, but stop them from getting the nukes in the first place. Your analogy between thoughcrimes when applied to humans vs. when applied to countries is not valid. In case of a country intelligence can be used to determine what the country is 'thinking'.
Let's assume that you don't want to be the world's policeman:
Then you should not giving a shit whatever happens in ME anyway. Israel gets wiped out - ok. Isreal wipes out the whole ME with nukes - also ok. Only when the nukes start flying towards US you retaliate.
Don't you think U.S. would love to wipe North Korea and Iran off the map just as much?
It's just polite enough not to admit it directly and just makes vague references like "axis of evil..." Same coin, just a different side.
But of course, we have been brainwashed into thinking that our country is somehow special, we are the God's chosen ones and when we want to wipe countries from the face of the earth it's "war against terrorism" when other countries want to wipe each other from the face of the earth it's "OMG! Teh terroristz!"
Many serious photographers will go shopping for lenses first, then buy a body. As you said, especially sports photographers, will want a fast telephoto and one of those will cost many times the cost of a body. For example a Canon 400mm f/2.8 could be around $10k. One would buy it, then find a body that fits it. I know, very counter-intuitive for most people...
Also as a consequence, most photographers when moving to digital had to find a body to fit their collection of lenses. My wife stuck with Pentax because she had a large collection of their wide angles, macros and fast normal primes, so switching to Canon or Nikon would have been _very_ expensive. But she really likes her Pentax K10D.
What's a better alternative? I see storage as a potential problem as well with anything else. Liquids gas is just too convinient...
In the future, I would probably opt for large nuclear power stations that regenerate their fuel (currently not allowed in US) with everyone driving small electrical vehicles. The vehicles could either be rechargable or standard batteries would be created so they could be swapped (equal for equals). They could either be recharged at home/at work, or have stations along the highways that would to that. If in the future we manage to harness nuclear fusion and have even more efficient power generation without much waste, the infrastructure will already be in place, ready to be used -- just replace the power stations.
A better way to recover the internal combustion dissipated energy is probably through some small steam engine. Didn't BMW try that? http://www.gizmag.com/go/4936/
After eating my refried beans and a cabbage salad for lunch, in a couple of hours I would be quite ready to accomplish my civic duty of solving our energy crisis.
Probably so if I had to guess. At first, adding another layer of abstraction between the manipulation functions and even for storage was probably seen as costly, because everything would have to go thourgh that extra layer. Now, going back and refactoring it, would probably mean refactoring the whole application. Perhaps, some GIMP wizards can explain better...
Obviously 16 bits _per_ channel, not 16 bits total for all channel (a.k.a a standard X-Windows diplay mode, but I see how the/. computer geeks would see it that way;-). You see, most RAW files will have 12 bits/color. That doesn't seem like a whole-lot at first, BUT each bit doubles the amount of information so 4 extra bits (from a regular 8bit/channel JPEG) get you a lot more color information. All of it can be useful during manipulation (white balance adjustment etc.).
Well, the manipulation is the key though. Some of those manipulations could use the additional color ranges.
I really like GIMP, especially the scripting (Since I program in Python for living) but it just really needs 16 bit colors to be accepted by photographers (my wife belongs for ex.... I am just the lab assistant;-).
Don't even mention GIMP to photographers who process raw files. It's lack of 16bit color support is embarrassing. And I've heard there is nothing planed at least until 3.0. Cinepaint branch might be an alternative but it is too out of date and geared towards the motion pictures not photography. I do use GIMP for fixing family and vacation photos but when my wife has to have her prints processed for an art show we use Photoshop - period.
As a small side-note, I wish they would change the name from Gimp to something else. Telling someone that you use _Gimp_ or that _Gimp_ has this nice scripting interface and so on, just does not sound very professional. Imagine a group of photographers discussing thier favorite software, there is: Photoshop, Aperture, Lightroom and then there is...Gimp. It just sounds childish and silly.
Slashdot Mirror
He-he, that's funny -- it desribes my wife too well. Every time I go to put food in there, the huge pack of Velvia and color infrared film is in my away. It's been like that since we got married. I keep telling her to switch completely to digital and she tells me I don't know what I am talking about, she is probably right...
Beware though, as you stray away from the sweet 50mm focal length you will pay astronomical prices for fast lenses...
The lower ISO you can get the more detail you could capture given that other parameters are fixed. Have you ever shot with Velvia ISO 50 film? -- it creates stunning details. I think Fujifilm discontinued it last year or so. In film the lower the ISO the finer the grain. As far as digital is concerned think of ISO as sensitivity of the CCD. You can turn the gain up to ISO 3200 but you will amplify a lot of noise too.
2) How many "cities" are built on permafrost?
Quite a few apparently. Not talking about New York type metropolis centers but still, when you add all those little villages and towns, that's quite a few inhabitants. Try driving on a road that used to be permafrost and now it is melted, that should be fun.
Again another reference for you enjoyment: Sinking Alaska
Have you heard of Dowson city? Well here it is then.
This applies even more so to Siberia probably, it's just that we don't hear about it in the American media as much. It is understandable that our scientists and journalists are concerned with our continent first. I was surprised when Slashdot picked up a story about Siberia here
Have you actually BEEN to northern Canada?
Have YOU BEEN to Siberia?
Russia, China, and Canada were all MUCH warmer at one point, as well as a LOT colder. Expecting it to stay as it is now is a bit extreme...
Again, you have missed the point of the discussion, please read the _whole_ path through this thread, starting with the original article. I never said that everything should stay the same. I said that humans should not alter an ecosystem like that of the tundra. Can humans alter ecosystems in a very radical way? -- Well I don't think I need to answer that question...
Wrong, wrong, wrong. First melting permafrost is a huge problem. Whole landscapes will change. Large trees that have been growing for centuries will simply fall down. Cities built on permafrost will end up in a marsh. Animal species adapted to live in the permafrost will die. Second, earth's ecosystem is not composed of isolated regions, where you can arbitrarily change the temperature in one and expect to have no change for the rest of the system. A warm Canada, Russia and China will probably mean a very warm equator and a submerged LA and NY. It would be an interesting world for a sci-fi book but not a reality I would want to live in or have my children live in.
Besides, if the people in Canada can't stand the heat, let them move to Mexico. That would be easier probably than waiting for the polar ice to melt, just so 10,000,000 people can switch to wearing light jackets instead of thick winter clothes.
It would have been much better from the PR point of view for Google to not make such "moral" claims. Every company is doing the same accounting trick but they never used such words as "evil" and "good" in their company's mission statement and therefore they don't suffer from this kind of criticism and controversy.
Usually it is very smart to manipulate such vague moral terms for one's benefit. Here is the algorithm: Step 1: Claim that "I will do no evil" . Step 2: As you go along, redifine what "evil" means" to match your actions. Step 3: Go to Step 1. Pretty easy algorithm -- nice and sweet.
It is true though... If you ask many of the serial killers or cruel dictators how they rate themselves, they would probably say that they are basically "good people". Of course, they have heavily modified what "good" means. These are extreme examples but this algorithm is essentially the same and it is used often by governments, individuals, religions, and _yes_ companies too.
Turing Test is just one possible goal of AI. In general when experts talk about AI they mean 4 different things:
1.AI::system that acts like humans
2.AI::system that thinks like humans
3.AI::system that acts rationally
4.AI::system that thinks rationally
So Turing test will only test (1). That would be very nice, but perhaps we really wanted to build (4)? In other words, every time AI is mentioned, it has to be qualified _which_ AI they are talking about...
By the way, in order to 'store' human intelligence it might be necessary to accomplish (2). The problem with (2) is that we don't know how humans think. We can see the results of our actions, which a Turing Test would use, but we still don't completely know how we know, how we encode information, how we store it and so on. So forget about (2) for a while...
I did, and therefore since all life is precious, we decided to stop using live mice at our heart research laboratory and switched to live humans. In order to save countless of rodents that we kill every month, I invite you to take their place. As you say, we are all one, so in studing _human_ heart disease we would rather prefer to work with humans. Give me you address and phone number so we can invite you to our lab, aneasthesize you, then cut your heart out and attach it to a machine and pump artificial blood and drugs through it.
Yes, I actually do work in such a lab...
Yes, the lab is _not_ in China, Afghanistan, or some other "terrorist laden country", we are right here in the heartland (pun intended) of America, right in your backyard. It will make it really convinent for to come to us.
Best quote I've seen in a while. Mod parent up!
Oh the horror! Won't anyone think of the kittens!?
Nazi KZ Doctors???
Pigeons are not people....
Repeat that a couple of times, please, perhaps it will sink in.
A lot of this un-ethical kind of stuff is going on in your backyard university lab probably, it's just not in the news. Russians tried to do the same with dolphins and other animals, Israelis do this with monkeys (see hear ). You should go tour your local pig farm and see how those animals are treated.
Just because these are Chinese scientists, i.e. foreigners (and of course, probably commie terrorists, right?) that we are all appalled.
As for USA is a westernized Judeo-Christian nation.
This will probably you'll get you started: Russia is just as much a Judeo-Christian nation (you'd be surprized that most Russians are not Communists but rather identify themselves as Orthodox Christians, in effect "more" Christians than our Protestants, but you wouldn't know that because it is not taught in the World Studies class in highschool), yet that doesn't prevent us from thinking of Russians as pseudo-rivals. And, Israel today is just as Christian as Iran. So even if there was any validity in "we like them because they have the same religion" your argument would not hold.
There are interviews conducted with ex CIA agents who admit shipping rocket launchers to the Moujahadin. Now, if CIA shipped them rocket launchers, don't you think they gave them a tip or two about how to use them. Remember the Moujas were trained by us to fight an organized army, and now the same Moujas are fighting another organized army, ours and our alies.
All they would need to do is make a phone call to someone in the US and tell them how they are going to smuggle the bomb in
Small suit-case nuclear bombs exist already, as soon as Iran could develop one, the Russians could detonate one of theirs in NY city because then Iran could be blamed. While U.S. goes to war with Iran, Russia uses the time to strengthen it's political position. Today, Russia is starting to 'dream' again about world domination. Putin already acknowledges that U.S.'s interests are starting to clash with their state interests in Europe. If they could support the Taliban, Iran or the Moujahedin without us noticing, they would!
but then you say
Why get involved then if Israel is just another pissant ME country? You don't want to be the world's policeman but then you want to be the world policeman. You have to get your act straight.
Let's assume that you want to be the world's policeman:
Then it is a million times easier to police by _preventing_ the problems. Don't act when the countries already burned themselves to the ground, but stop them from getting the nukes in the first place. Your analogy between thoughcrimes when applied to humans vs. when applied to countries is not valid. In case of a country intelligence can be used to determine what the country is 'thinking'.
Let's assume that you don't want to be the world's policeman:
Then you should not giving a shit whatever happens in ME anyway. Israel gets wiped out - ok. Isreal wipes out the whole ME with nukes - also ok. Only when the nukes start flying towards US you retaliate.
So pick one of the two...
It's just polite enough not to admit it directly and just makes vague references like "axis of evil..." Same coin, just a different side.
But of course, we have been brainwashed into thinking that our country is somehow special, we are the God's chosen ones and when we want to wipe countries from the face of the earth it's "war against terrorism" when other countries want to wipe each other from the face of the earth it's "OMG! Teh terroristz!"
Also as a consequence, most photographers when moving to digital had to find a body to fit their collection of lenses. My wife stuck with Pentax because she had a large collection of their wide angles, macros and fast normal primes, so switching to Canon or Nikon would have been _very_ expensive. But she really likes her Pentax K10D.
In the future, I would probably opt for large nuclear power stations that regenerate their fuel (currently not allowed in US) with everyone driving small electrical vehicles. The vehicles could either be rechargable or standard batteries would be created so they could be swapped (equal for equals). They could either be recharged at home/at work, or have stations along the highways that would to that. If in the future we manage to harness nuclear fusion and have even more efficient power generation without much waste, the infrastructure will already be in place, ready to be used -- just replace the power stations.
A better way to recover the internal combustion dissipated energy is probably through some small steam engine. Didn't BMW try that? http://www.gizmag.com/go/4936/
Probably so if I had to guess. At first, adding another layer of abstraction between the manipulation functions and even for storage was probably seen as costly, because everything would have to go thourgh that extra layer. Now, going back and refactoring it, would probably mean refactoring the whole application. Perhaps, some GIMP wizards can explain better...
Obviously 16 bits _per_ channel, not 16 bits total for all channel (a.k.a a standard X-Windows diplay mode, but I see how the /. computer geeks would see it that way ;-). You see, most RAW files will have 12 bits/color. That doesn't seem like a whole-lot at first, BUT each bit doubles the amount of information so 4 extra bits (from a regular 8bit/channel JPEG) get you a lot more color information. All of it can be useful during manipulation (white balance adjustment etc.).
I really like GIMP, especially the scripting (Since I program in Python for living) but it just really needs 16 bit colors to be accepted by photographers (my wife belongs for ex.... I am just the lab assistant ;-).
You have obviously never bought lenses, my friend.
As a small side-note, I wish they would change the name from Gimp to something else. Telling someone that you use _Gimp_ or that _Gimp_ has this nice scripting interface and so on, just does not sound very professional. Imagine a group of photographers discussing thier favorite software, there is: Photoshop, Aperture, Lightroom and then there is ...Gimp. It just sounds childish and silly.