You think the Saudis haven't attacked us? Or the Islamists?
Of the 19 hijackers, fourteen of them were Saudis. Funding came through Islam -- this is well established. Money was moved by hawala, a traditional, trust-based Islamic method for the transferring of funds, and by couriers, according to the CIA. And you only have to look at how the Saudis treat women and girls to see how they view Islam. "Submission", indeed.
The idea that this wasn't an act of Islam is ludicrous. Consequently, the idea that Islam should not be held responsible for the acts driven by its book of aggression is also ludicrous. Finally, in order to GET Islamics to effectively police the members of their belief system, they need to be held responsible.
Sorry, that should have been a trillion dollars... not a billion... and that doesn't even count the fucking patriot act and the "homeland idiocy" department costs.
I didn't say it would end anything. It's straightforward retaliation for the attack on the skyscrapers in the vein of, "you killed 3 thousand and destroyed some of our culture, fine, we'll kill ~3 million, and destroy some of your culture. Your move, signed, ready-to-do-it-again-as-many-times-as-you-fucking-idiots-want-to-play." Even idiot Islamists can do math.
Also - I should point out that the sum total of people killed using the administration's "strategy" is, thus far, about 900,000 people, of which about 7000 were our troops, contractors, etc. In the process, we have spent about a billion dollars, driven our economy into the ground, and not accomplished much of anything other than feed tax dollars to the military industrial complex.
If indeed my "armchair strategy" had been used, our total cost would have been a million or two dollars, no US lives lost, and about double the enemy casualties.
And if that left us with the same problems we started with, well then, how does that differ from the administration's strategy?
There will be 50,000 US troops there through 2011; no doubt after 2011, there will still be troops there. If you need something to compare this to, you know the "yellow / orange / red" alert the idiots flash on tv? This is like that. A superficial change in announced status that means absolutely nothing.
Iraq is presently seventh among all nations in the amount of petroleum products exported to the US. That tells you exactly what will happen with our troop presence: nothing that would allow that status to diminish by dint of action by the natives.
Slavery is alive and well. How do you think most license plates are made? Go read the thirteenth amendment. It specifically allows for slavery, as long as you're convicted of "a crime." Anything. And both the federal and the state legislatures spend all day, every working day, coming up with new ways to qualify citizens for just that role. So much so that is has become understood and broadly accepted that if you engage in many harmless acts between entirely consenting adults, you're now qualified for enrollment in the slave program, and as an additional bonus, relegated to the new, unemployable underclass.
And strangely enough, if you look into any prison, you'll find that the majority of the residents are the same color as those who used to work in the plantation fields.
...and I presume you already understand that when the government takes your work product - money - by force, and applies it to things you don't support - that is also slavery. You are forced to work for their benefit - you have no way to opt out other than not working at all - and they define what the result of your energies is - you don't. If you don't think it's slavery, try not paying your taxes and observe the results.
Keep your political bashing out of war strategy, the lives of our troops [..] [are] more important than scoring political points.
You want to save the lives of our troops? Pull them out. Right now. It's a little tough for Afghanis to kill them if they aren't in-country. Right now, they're dying for exactly one major reason: To benefit corporate interests here. They're not protecting us; and they're doing damned little for anyone in Afghanistan. They are the lever arm for the transfer of taxes from the citizens to the corporations. Nothing more. And yes, they are dying for that.
Keep your political bashing out of war strategy, [...] the future of those countries is more important than scoring political points.
The future of those countries? What about the future of Sudan? Are we fighting for those people? No, of course we're not -- we're letting them go to hell in a hand-basket. Because its not convenient to fight there. Don't fool yourself into thinking that we're in Afghanistan "for the future of Afghanistan." We're there to engage in war where we can make an adequate excuse to the naive: chasing down the "terr'ists." It's not about saving Afghani citizens from themselves. If it was, we'd be in Sudan, actually we would have been in Sudan first. Not to mention a host of other countries.
Speaking (mostly) as a conservative myself, if we had actually wanted to solve the problem we would have:
Armored and isolated the cockpits of all commercial aircraft
Dropped one FAB or a MOAB - or perhaps even a nuke - on Mecca during the pilgrimage.
The 9/11 terrorists were primarily Saudi; they were primarily funded by Saudis; they were entirely Islamic in creed and goals; and the one place we did absolutely nothing? Saudi Arabia. Instead, we attacked a secular country - Iraq - for the most transparent of reasons, to control the oil, a goal we did in fact achieve. If you want to know why we're at war, follow the money. It'll tell you, every time. It had *zero* to do with 9/11, except as a sop to the naive. Afghanistan... the same.
In the meantime, the Saudis have religious fanatic Islamites running all over the country like cockroaches, as an actual enforcement arm of the Sharia; women are treated as property (and girls are treated worse.) And again, we're not in there, nor are we going to be, helping the people or straightening out the system the way they like to make you think we "are" in Afghanistan.
We are not engaged in any just wars. And despite the injury it would do to the military industrial complex, we should get the fuck out of both Iraq and Afghanistan yesterday at the latest. If we were moral and ethical about the use of our military, that is. But we're not.
I suspect that if it's possible to get very many images of the subject then you can gather enough data to rebuild what would be a more accurate image of the subject.
Yes. We call that technique "stacking." And it can result in profound improvements. Here is a before and after of stacking; at left, one normal shot from the camera at pushed ISO 12800 (ISO 3200 with an additional 2-stop digital push, in-camera), at right, the result of combining 36 of those shots and recovering the data through the noise. Kind of amazing, isn't it? That was done with nothing but a Canon EOS 50D camera and Canon's 200mm f/2.8 lens, no telescope, no tracking rig of any kind. I wrote software to rotate and translate each frame to get them to overlay despite the motion between frames, and then take a 48-bit accurate average of the resulting stacks of pixels; results as you see.
The Ring Nebula is magnitude 9, which is no minor feat to resolve with a middle of the line DSLR... but stacking is the big hammer when it comes to this kind of work. You want to talk low light... magnitude 9 is low, all right. And if that's not enough to impress you, there's a magnitude 15(!!!) object resolved in that same picture -- see the notes. Doesn't get much more "low light" than that.
Well, sort of, I disagree somewhat. For starters, take camera phones. What do they need to do this? [...] seems like accelerometer data.
Right, that and some computing power, which they also have, though if you do this at any speed, it's likely to consume quite a bit more battery. Yeah, camera phones might be a good fit (although they're also a good fit for a deformable lens, which could perform IS directly, instead of after the fact.)
Sure, a lot of P&S cameras now have IS, and a lot of SLR lenses have IS. Maybe that gets you an extra stop or two.
Actually, they're up to about four stops now. The new IS systems are breathtaking compared to non-IS shooting. Also, Canon puts IS in the lens; others put it in the camera (they displace the sensor instead of the lens) and frankly, I wish Canon would do this too, so the primes w/o stabilization would work better... I've no objection to both, with lens over-riding the body stab if present.
But what if you *also* had accelerometer data to apply? If you were in a really low-light scenario and a tripod was impractical (for any number of completely realistic reasons), could this give you yet another stop?
I'm guessing not. As you noted, the results are a bit of a mess. They're gaining in some places, and fouling up the image in others. Better to not have the blur in the first place, which is what real IS gives you.
See, this problem is only partially solvable they way they are approaching it; the reason why is that in a 2D image, the data that remains is smeared into an XY plane by the motion of the camera during exposure. Which they then try to correct. But the actual smearing that goes on is XYZ... yet there is no Z data remaining in the bitplane. An actual IS system can correct XYZ prior to the sensor so that the smearing actually is corrected for before it gets into the bitplane. If you can't determine the Z data, you can't deconvolve it, even if you have the Z motion (which they do.)
Low-light photography to me always is a huge game of tradeoffs between using a slow shutter and getting blurring, using a fast aperture setting and getting narrow DoF, and using a high ISO setting and getting high noise. And for that reason, I would welcome anything that gives more choices in that arena.
Well, in my experience, the best results come from using high ISO and the latest noise reduction tools (DFine by NIK is my favorite, followed closely by Noise Ninja by PictureCode), combined with the widest aperture you can get away with, and good IS if available in the lens or camera. Those three things can turn a tough shot into something quite smooth and interesting. For instance, this image was shot at ISO 1600 using a Canon 50D, and you'd be hard pressed to know that unless you have the shooting data. That's pretty much down to high quality noise reduction.
This shot was taken at 1/15th second, handheld, ISO 3200... using Canon's IS, and if you look at the details in the original size (click "All Sizes" over the image), you can see that there isn't a bit of shake/blur in that photo. Add some noise reduction (which I did) and bingo, better results than we really have any reason to expect, at least if you come from film, as I do.
In my dream world Canon stops pushing the pixel count for a couple generations and just works on decreasing noise.
I'm right with you, brother. I keep telling them to give us an APS-C sized chunk of the 5DmkII's sensor... they've already got the tech, and that sensor is *way* quieter than the 50D's or the 7D's... it'd be about an 8 MP sensor, and I would welcome it with open arms. I would much rather have 8 mp of quiet than
You know, you -- and 99% of the others bitching about the Gimp -- you're utterly full of shit. I write commercial image processing / editing / animation / generation software for a living, I'm expert - you can read that as "terrifyingly exert" - with Photoshop, Gimp and a whole raft of others... and Gimp is an easy to use powerhouse.
Now I will grant you exactly ONE thing, and that is, you need to sit down and learn to use it. That should take a few hours if you're familiar with something (anything) else; maybe a week hunting down tutorials, or a day hanging with a qualified mentor, if editing bitmaps is all new to you.
If it takes you longer than that, you're either stupid or lazy.
There's *nothing* significantly wrong with the Gimp. It has its limits, like everything does (Photoshop has some really annoying limits too), but for the vast majority of image processing and touch-up needs, it's very nice.
Oh, mommie, my crop function is in a different menu... Some people just need a good smack in the head.
If you really knew what you were doing, you'd have, and use, a whole suite of these programs, because for the big ones, there are areas where they excel, and that's the time to put them into play. If you can't learn to use them because the keystrokes are different, or there is a different paradigm... it isn't the program that sucks. It's you.
Also, if you actually knew how to use them, you wouldn't be bitching about them.
Clearly (pun intended) the results have a ways to go yet. Look at the coca-cola image, at the 'a' on the end of the cola... that thing is hosed by the blur, and they're unable to recover it because there's no intermediate contrasting color. Same thing for the spokes on the car rims.
This problem can't be completely solved post-picture. Only large-scale elements with nothing else around them will yield pixel-sharp solutions.
The optimum way to correct blur is to apply active or passive (e.g. tripod) stabilization to the lens prior to the shot; active technology is already pretty decent (photographers tend to measure things in stops; it's intuitive to them... when they say an active stabilizer "gives you" four stops, for instance with Canon, what they mean is that you can shoot four stops slower with the shutter and you won't get blur from camera movement.) Doesn't solve subject movement at all, but then, nothing really does other than cranking down the exposure time.
So... considering lens stabilization has been in-camera for years, and this requires more hardware, but gives you less... I'm going to go out on a limb and say it isn't of interest to camera folks. Maybe in some esoteric role... a spacecraft or something else with a tight power budget where stabilization can't be done for some reason (certainly measurement takes less power than actual stabilization)... but DSLRs and point-and-shoots... no.
I've got almost half a million in the bank, and can easily afford to pay my own bills, thank you very much.
You're still playing the lottery, pal. There are plenty of diseases and injuries that could eat that half million in just a fraction of the time it took you to collect it. Multiplied by the number of people in your family. Know how I know? I *used* to have a seven figure bank account, that's how. I got some sick people around me, and that whole self-insurance thing... yeah, doesn't actually work when the shit hits the fan.
And... frankly... if you've got 500k in the bank, I don't even care to hear you whine about a $900 tax delta, regardless of the reason. You discredit yourself instantly. Buy some bloody insurance, they won't charge you the tax, you get great value for your money.
I am being forced to pay a $950 Fine because I exercised my Pro-Choice right not to buy hospital insurance.
The alternative is to let you go without healthcare.
If we do that, you, and most people like you, will almost certainly still be yowling at the head of the queue when your appendix suddenly bursts, or you find a malignant lymphoma in your armpit, or Diabetes rears its head and you find out that the only decent med (Byetta) costs more per month than you have to spare in four months. You'd get care you can't afford, run up medical bills you can't pay, declare bankruptcy (or just game the collection agencies and creditors), and the rest of us will then pay higher insurance rates because YOU figured you could game mother nature using your only playing card, relatively good health at the moment, as the key trick.
But you know what? Mother nature's gonna get you anyway. So people a great deal smarter than you are are trying to come up with a way to keep you as healthy as possible without screwing up everyone else. Which is to say, get you to contribute small amounts as long as you can, so that if and when the time comes to spend a lot on you, it can be justified. Or perhaps that money will be spent on your lady's breast cancer (or your fella's testicular cancer... or your child's crossed eyes. Etc. Ad fucking infinitum. Mother nature is a bitch.) In any case, spread the money out, focus the care. It's simple; it's sensible; and it is as pro-society as enforced education and sanitation are.
Is the current bill optimum? Not by a long shot. Too many idiots fighting against what we actually need. But it's a step in the right direction. Be much obliged if you'd use that melon on your neck to think ahead further than your nose.
The Tea Party's got a few good points here and there, but arguing against the healthcare bill... that's definitely not one of them.
Yes, and I strongly suspect that -- don't know, but think about it -- the Tesla, with 288 hp, running against the Porsche at 218 hp... would kick its ass. That's about a 25% difference in power in favor of the Tesla; also the Tesla weighs 2690 lbs, and the Porsche weighs 3300 lbs... another 18% win for the Tesla.
Yeah, I think the Tesla is a better car all around. Gasoline... LOL.
As is easily seen, it's been colder than normal for the last six months, we're ahead on precipitation, February was unusually cold in a very consistent streak, snow continued into late May, quite late as compared to normal, and here, in late July, the temperatures continue to reach below normal ranges consistently, with only occasional excursions above.
One region does not by any means a global climate make, but I'm afraid I still have to take issue with "it's been a scorcher for folks all around the world." Not in this part of the world, it hasn't.
HDMI is a hell of a lot easier to connect than DVI.
It is? How? They're both cables with single connectors on each end. I fail to see how one is significantly more difficult than the other. And for the record, I have, and use, both.
My father has something like a 60" plasma screen, and it's just as easy to connect to that -- but I'm sure as hell not "installing" my laptop into his entertainment center. I'm taking it with me when we're done watching the movie I brought.
You cart your laptop around to show movies? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that's atypical. Maybe its time to get dad some real AV gear, eh? You know, something you can slap a thumb drive into? Instead of... [laughing] your whole laptop?
In addition, people seem to carry around game consoles more than you'd think -- take the above TV example. If I owned a console, I'd likely play it on a monitor or a small-ish TV, but I certainly wouldn't mind picking it up and carrying it to plug into a bigger TV for a few hours, say, for a party.
Oh, I'm quite familiar with that. We have multiple XBox 360 parties here all the time. We have a dedicated ethernet switch for them as well as multiple monitors. I just don't think there's anything so awful about plugging in three colored RCA cables into the three matching colored jacks... plus an optical cable... plus an ethernet cable... as compared to a single HDMI cable and an ethernet cable. In fact, I think whining about it is kind of hilarious. What will you do when faced with something complex, like making a sandwich, tying your shoes or trying to shell some beauty out of her garters and camisole when she's gone and put her panties on first instead of last? ZOMG, look, it's TWO CABLES and FOUR PLUGS!
Maybe, but WTF does it have to do with HDMI?
It has to do with HDMI vs. component. Not versus DVI. DVI is HDMI for video with better connectors. No real difference except the higher quality physical connection DVI offers. For audio, an optical or coaxial cable, and you're done. Trivial.
So, what, should I go back to analog to avoid the DRM?
What do I care what you do? My interest is what you *claim*, because that influences others. Nothing wrong with analog (meaning component video) that isn't something done by fiat. Displays sync up to it faster (no key frames, and no negotiation, and no encraption (not a typo)), it can easily be spidered out to multiple monitors / switches, etc.
...there's no reason to think that gays are stupider than anyone else, and since they comprise a minority of the population, said boss, while undoubtedly stupid, is probably straight.
Perhaps some day you will be able to apply that same intellect that allows you to detect snake oil in audio gear to the snake oil in sexual bigotry.
The problem with your stealing argument is, when you steal something, your taking away from someone else and leaving them with nothing. Copyright infringement is NOT stealing. It's wrong, but IMO not as bad as thieving a physical object.
Stealing has zero to do with "physical" and 100% to do with value. Your argument is completely without merit. The harm that stealing does is to take something of value from someone else without consent and/or recompense. If you drain someone's paypal account, you're not taking anything physical, you're just fiddling with numbers. But you're stealing because you're taking value directly. If you take a copy of software from them for nothing, where they only wish to part with it for recompense, you're increasing your value without compensating the creator. That's theft. If you take someone's virginity without their consent, you have stolen something irreplaceable, even if there is no physical change at all.
Theft is the act of appropriating value that you have no right to. It isn't the "picking up of something physical", and it has nothing to do with what you leave behind, either: It has to do with value you take away you have no right to. It's all about rights, and rights are things that you -- and a lot of other people -- have given very little serious thought to.
the difference is someone is MAKING MONEY off someone without paying them what they owe
No. When you steal someone's stuff, you don't hurt them by making money. You hurt them because you took away THEIR opportunity to make money. You hurt them because you took valuable material from them. One copy's worth (for you) or a hundred (for your posse.) Either way, you're stealing. The only difference is the quantity. When you steal music or software, you are in possession of something you have NO right to. You are no better than any other thief.
Because the people we hear about who get sued for copying music are not doing it for money, whereas the people in the article are large companies trying to actively profit off the images in question
No. No one pays BoingBoing because this image is there. They're not offering it for sale, or charging to view it. But BoingBoing benefits because they're not out of pocket, yet they can show the image. In the end, more money in BoingBoing's pocket because their status quo as a content site is maintained, without recompensing the artist. An indirect financial benefit consequent to the artist's work.
Likewise, typically no one pays an individual for stealing music for their own use; but the individual benefits because they're not out of pocket, yet they have the product. The individual's status quo as a "hip, I heard that" and a "happy, I enjoy that" individual is maintained, without recompensing the artist. In the end, considering the music is in hand, more money in pocket: an indirect financial benefit consequent to the artist's work.
There is zero ethical difference between these two; in both cases, the artist creates, the art is used, and the artist's payment is weaseled out of. There is zero ethical difference between taking a digital product against the producer's wishes and stealing a vase out of my company showroom.
When someone creates something, it is theirs to decide what to do with it. If they want to sell it, as a consumer, you get to ethically vote with your wallet: Buy, and support them; don't buy, and don't support them. However, if you take the a product that is not offered freely without meeting their terms... that's just stealing.
It's mildly entertaining to watch the excuse train pull up and unload the same tired arguments, but in the end, it is stealing. BoingBoing is no less and no more guilty of stealing here than any cluetard who steals commercial music of software products. The degree that they are financially and reasonably liable is probably very little (same as an individual downloader) because odds are no one can show that they did any more or less business because that image was there... but ethically, they shit the bed just as badly as someone stealing jewelry.
If you want free pictures, you can start by going and visiting my flickr account. I don't use CC; I claim copyright only so I can specify that the rights are handed out, and allow unlimited use of any kind. If you want free software, go where the software is offered for free. I write free software, too (really free, not GPL [free unless you redistribute, then must do what we tell you.]) There are many more like me.
If free is your price, then that's where you should be looking: Products that are intended to be free for the uses you will make of them and explicitly say so. If you want a product that the creator deems only available for a specific exchange, either (A) make that exchange or (B) become a thief. There are no other options. You can, of course, add the "I'll make excuses" flag, but you're still firmly in column A or B.
Resolving detail on planets in other solar systems is technically feasible. Blurring is not inherent in the process, as it is with telescopes on the ground -- there's no atmosphere or other randomly distorting factor between there and our solar system, where the observing system would be; nor is the technology prone to blurring. Also, you're wrong (again) about the comparability of the baselines; there's very little practical limit on the baseline of a space-based LBII; there's no technical reason whatsoever such a baseline couldn't be as much as a lightyear. With a (synthesized) aperture of that size, detail of targets 10...100 light years out would be very good indeed. All it takes is time to position the instruments, and time to manufacture them. Once the initial manufacturing investment is made, more and more instruments could be added on a continuing basis at no cost. That's what we ought to be doing.
Occultation and wobble don't tell us anything we need to know beyond what we already knew, which is, planets are everywhere.
Your argument that other telescopes "need" Kepler... I'm not buying that. We already knew other stars had planets. Kepler is going to ID some that are smaller. Not if they are habitable, mind you, just smaller. Without knowing more, this information isn't very useful.
What we really need to know - and do not know now - is if there are planets out there that are supporting life. As we know it, or otherwise. In order to do that, yes, we need spectroscopic readouts of the light bouncing off of planets, not the light coming directly from the stars.
So what does that call for? The ability to see light reflected from those planets. And how can we do that, while also gaining the ability to resolve everything else better as well? I already told you. But all you can concentrate on, it seems, is Kepler.
Very few people are as pro-science as I am. I just hate to see money spent on half-assed projects, and the more so when they're on the expensive side, as Kepler was.
We should be in space. Already. We should be mining and refining materials from asteroids. Perhaps we shouldn't even be mining materials here, at all. Mining on earth is rarely environmentally friendly.
We should not be fucking around in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we should not go into Iran (though the odds favor exactly that.) We waste so much of our resources that could be going to actually inform and enlighten us that it literally makes me ill to think about it. And then sometimes we spend what little we get in the science budget very poorly.
Hubble was (and remains) a great instrument, returning tons of new data for the money. Kepler isn't. When the mission started, we knew there were tons of planets out there. When it ends, we're going to know the same thing, only with the codicil that some of them are earth sized. Which, really, we also already knew -- because our system has 3, or 4, depending on how you like to set your bounds.
We need to get off the surface here. Robotically. It should have been done years ago. It should already be ongoing. But it isn't. And that's because our "leaders" are some of the dumbest sheepfuckers ever fielded by an ignorant and deluded citizenry. The resources we could be retrieving... the structures and instruments we could be fielding... the reduced strain on our own environment... all crippled because we waste our substance in all the wrong directions. Then the little bit we manage to get for science... goes into projects that we're not going to get anything meaningful out of. Damn, it's frustrating.
Sounds to me like you've been the victim of disinformation designed to keep you from wanting to better yourself. But hey. Maybe they really would make you unhappy. Maybe you're just that dysfunctional that you couldn't handle wealth.
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You think the Saudis haven't attacked us? Or the Islamists?
Of the 19 hijackers, fourteen of them were Saudis. Funding came through Islam -- this is well established. Money was moved by hawala, a traditional, trust-based Islamic method for the transferring of funds, and by couriers, according to the CIA. And you only have to look at how the Saudis treat women and girls to see how they view Islam. "Submission", indeed.
The idea that this wasn't an act of Islam is ludicrous. Consequently, the idea that Islam should not be held responsible for the acts driven by its book of aggression is also ludicrous. Finally, in order to GET Islamics to effectively police the members of their belief system, they need to be held responsible.
Sorry, that should have been a trillion dollars... not a billion... and that doesn't even count the fucking patriot act and the "homeland idiocy" department costs.
I didn't say it would end anything. It's straightforward retaliation for the attack on the skyscrapers in the vein of, "you killed 3 thousand and destroyed some of our culture, fine, we'll kill ~3 million, and destroy some of your culture. Your move, signed, ready-to-do-it-again-as-many-times-as-you-fucking-idiots-want-to-play." Even idiot Islamists can do math.
Also - I should point out that the sum total of people killed using the administration's "strategy" is, thus far, about 900,000 people, of which about 7000 were our troops, contractors, etc. In the process, we have spent about a billion dollars, driven our economy into the ground, and not accomplished much of anything other than feed tax dollars to the military industrial complex.
If indeed my "armchair strategy" had been used, our total cost would have been a million or two dollars, no US lives lost, and about double the enemy casualties.
And if that left us with the same problems we started with, well then, how does that differ from the administration's strategy?
Over to you. :o)
There will be 50,000 US troops there through 2011; no doubt after 2011, there will still be troops there. If you need something to compare this to, you know the "yellow / orange / red" alert the idiots flash on tv? This is like that. A superficial change in announced status that means absolutely nothing.
Iraq is presently seventh among all nations in the amount of petroleum products exported to the US. That tells you exactly what will happen with our troop presence: nothing that would allow that status to diminish by dint of action by the natives.
Slavery is alive and well. How do you think most license plates are made? Go read the thirteenth amendment. It specifically allows for slavery, as long as you're convicted of "a crime." Anything. And both the federal and the state legislatures spend all day, every working day, coming up with new ways to qualify citizens for just that role. So much so that is has become understood and broadly accepted that if you engage in many harmless acts between entirely consenting adults, you're now qualified for enrollment in the slave program, and as an additional bonus, relegated to the new, unemployable underclass.
And strangely enough, if you look into any prison, you'll find that the majority of the residents are the same color as those who used to work in the plantation fields.
You want to save the lives of our troops? Pull them out. Right now. It's a little tough for Afghanis to kill them if they aren't in-country. Right now, they're dying for exactly one major reason: To benefit corporate interests here. They're not protecting us; and they're doing damned little for anyone in Afghanistan. They are the lever arm for the transfer of taxes from the citizens to the corporations. Nothing more. And yes, they are dying for that.
The future of those countries? What about the future of Sudan? Are we fighting for those people? No, of course we're not -- we're letting them go to hell in a hand-basket. Because its not convenient to fight there. Don't fool yourself into thinking that we're in Afghanistan "for the future of Afghanistan." We're there to engage in war where we can make an adequate excuse to the naive: chasing down the "terr'ists." It's not about saving Afghani citizens from themselves. If it was, we'd be in Sudan, actually we would have been in Sudan first. Not to mention a host of other countries.
Speaking (mostly) as a conservative myself, if we had actually wanted to solve the problem we would have:
The 9/11 terrorists were primarily Saudi; they were primarily funded by Saudis; they were entirely Islamic in creed and goals; and the one place we did absolutely nothing? Saudi Arabia. Instead, we attacked a secular country - Iraq - for the most transparent of reasons, to control the oil, a goal we did in fact achieve. If you want to know why we're at war, follow the money. It'll tell you, every time. It had *zero* to do with 9/11, except as a sop to the naive. Afghanistan... the same.
In the meantime, the Saudis have religious fanatic Islamites running all over the country like cockroaches, as an actual enforcement arm of the Sharia; women are treated as property (and girls are treated worse.) And again, we're not in there, nor are we going to be, helping the people or straightening out the system the way they like to make you think we "are" in Afghanistan.
We are not engaged in any just wars. And despite the injury it would do to the military industrial complex, we should get the fuck out of both Iraq and Afghanistan yesterday at the latest. If we were moral and ethical about the use of our military, that is. But we're not.
Yes. We call that technique "stacking." And it can result in profound improvements. Here is a before and after of stacking; at left, one normal shot from the camera at pushed ISO 12800 (ISO 3200 with an additional 2-stop digital push, in-camera), at right, the result of combining 36 of those shots and recovering the data through the noise. Kind of amazing, isn't it? That was done with nothing but a Canon EOS 50D camera and Canon's 200mm f/2.8 lens, no telescope, no tracking rig of any kind. I wrote software to rotate and translate each frame to get them to overlay despite the motion between frames, and then take a 48-bit accurate average of the resulting stacks of pixels; results as you see.
The Ring Nebula is magnitude 9, which is no minor feat to resolve with a middle of the line DSLR... but stacking is the big hammer when it comes to this kind of work. You want to talk low light... magnitude 9 is low, all right. And if that's not enough to impress you, there's a magnitude 15(!!!) object resolved in that same picture -- see the notes. Doesn't get much more "low light" than that.
Right, that and some computing power, which they also have, though if you do this at any speed, it's likely to consume quite a bit more battery. Yeah, camera phones might be a good fit (although they're also a good fit for a deformable lens, which could perform IS directly, instead of after the fact.)
Actually, they're up to about four stops now. The new IS systems are breathtaking compared to non-IS shooting. Also, Canon puts IS in the lens; others put it in the camera (they displace the sensor instead of the lens) and frankly, I wish Canon would do this too, so the primes w/o stabilization would work better... I've no objection to both, with lens over-riding the body stab if present.
I'm guessing not. As you noted, the results are a bit of a mess. They're gaining in some places, and fouling up the image in others. Better to not have the blur in the first place, which is what real IS gives you.
See, this problem is only partially solvable they way they are approaching it; the reason why is that in a 2D image, the data that remains is smeared into an XY plane by the motion of the camera during exposure. Which they then try to correct. But the actual smearing that goes on is XYZ... yet there is no Z data remaining in the bitplane. An actual IS system can correct XYZ prior to the sensor so that the smearing actually is corrected for before it gets into the bitplane. If you can't determine the Z data, you can't deconvolve it, even if you have the Z motion (which they do.)
Well, in my experience, the best results come from using high ISO and the latest noise reduction tools (DFine by NIK is my favorite, followed closely by Noise Ninja by PictureCode), combined with the widest aperture you can get away with, and good IS if available in the lens or camera. Those three things can turn a tough shot into something quite smooth and interesting. For instance, this image was shot at ISO 1600 using a Canon 50D, and you'd be hard pressed to know that unless you have the shooting data. That's pretty much down to high quality noise reduction.
This shot was taken at 1/15th second, handheld, ISO 3200... using Canon's IS, and if you look at the details in the original size (click "All Sizes" over the image), you can see that there isn't a bit of shake/blur in that photo. Add some noise reduction (which I did) and bingo, better results than we really have any reason to expect, at least if you come from film, as I do.
I'm right with you, brother. I keep telling them to give us an APS-C sized chunk of the 5DmkII's sensor... they've already got the tech, and that sensor is *way* quieter than the 50D's or the 7D's... it'd be about an 8 MP sensor, and I would welcome it with open arms. I would much rather have 8 mp of quiet than
You know, you -- and 99% of the others bitching about the Gimp -- you're utterly full of shit. I write commercial image processing / editing / animation / generation software for a living, I'm expert - you can read that as "terrifyingly exert" - with Photoshop, Gimp and a whole raft of others... and Gimp is an easy to use powerhouse.
Now I will grant you exactly ONE thing, and that is, you need to sit down and learn to use it. That should take a few hours if you're familiar with something (anything) else; maybe a week hunting down tutorials, or a day hanging with a qualified mentor, if editing bitmaps is all new to you.
If it takes you longer than that, you're either stupid or lazy.
There's *nothing* significantly wrong with the Gimp. It has its limits, like everything does (Photoshop has some really annoying limits too), but for the vast majority of image processing and touch-up needs, it's very nice.
Oh, mommie, my crop function is in a different menu... Some people just need a good smack in the head.
If you really knew what you were doing, you'd have, and use, a whole suite of these programs, because for the big ones, there are areas where they excel, and that's the time to put them into play. If you can't learn to use them because the keystrokes are different, or there is a different paradigm... it isn't the program that sucks. It's you.
Also, if you actually knew how to use them, you wouldn't be bitching about them.
Clearly (pun intended) the results have a ways to go yet. Look at the coca-cola image, at the 'a' on the end of the cola... that thing is hosed by the blur, and they're unable to recover it because there's no intermediate contrasting color. Same thing for the spokes on the car rims.
This problem can't be completely solved post-picture. Only large-scale elements with nothing else around them will yield pixel-sharp solutions.
The optimum way to correct blur is to apply active or passive (e.g. tripod) stabilization to the lens prior to the shot; active technology is already pretty decent (photographers tend to measure things in stops; it's intuitive to them... when they say an active stabilizer "gives you" four stops, for instance with Canon, what they mean is that you can shoot four stops slower with the shutter and you won't get blur from camera movement.) Doesn't solve subject movement at all, but then, nothing really does other than cranking down the exposure time.
So... considering lens stabilization has been in-camera for years, and this requires more hardware, but gives you less... I'm going to go out on a limb and say it isn't of interest to camera folks. Maybe in some esoteric role... a spacecraft or something else with a tight power budget where stabilization can't be done for some reason (certainly measurement takes less power than actual stabilization)... but DSLRs and point-and-shoots... no.
You're still playing the lottery, pal. There are plenty of diseases and injuries that could eat that half million in just a fraction of the time it took you to collect it. Multiplied by the number of people in your family. Know how I know? I *used* to have a seven figure bank account, that's how. I got some sick people around me, and that whole self-insurance thing... yeah, doesn't actually work when the shit hits the fan.
And... frankly... if you've got 500k in the bank, I don't even care to hear you whine about a $900 tax delta, regardless of the reason. You discredit yourself instantly. Buy some bloody insurance, they won't charge you the tax, you get great value for your money.
The alternative is to let you go without healthcare.
If we do that, you, and most people like you, will almost certainly still be yowling at the head of the queue when your appendix suddenly bursts, or you find a malignant lymphoma in your armpit, or Diabetes rears its head and you find out that the only decent med (Byetta) costs more per month than you have to spare in four months. You'd get care you can't afford, run up medical bills you can't pay, declare bankruptcy (or just game the collection agencies and creditors), and the rest of us will then pay higher insurance rates because YOU figured you could game mother nature using your only playing card, relatively good health at the moment, as the key trick.
But you know what? Mother nature's gonna get you anyway. So people a great deal smarter than you are are trying to come up with a way to keep you as healthy as possible without screwing up everyone else. Which is to say, get you to contribute small amounts as long as you can, so that if and when the time comes to spend a lot on you, it can be justified. Or perhaps that money will be spent on your lady's breast cancer (or your fella's testicular cancer... or your child's crossed eyes. Etc. Ad fucking infinitum. Mother nature is a bitch.) In any case, spread the money out, focus the care. It's simple; it's sensible; and it is as pro-society as enforced education and sanitation are.
Is the current bill optimum? Not by a long shot. Too many idiots fighting against what we actually need. But it's a step in the right direction. Be much obliged if you'd use that melon on your neck to think ahead further than your nose.
The Tea Party's got a few good points here and there, but arguing against the healthcare bill... that's definitely not one of them.
Whoosh, and I don't mean the car.
By comparing apples to apples, I meant, electric to electric. Which I would have thought the numbers made obvious, but you managed to surprise me.
Now read my post again. :)
Yes, and I strongly suspect that -- don't know, but think about it -- the Tesla, with 288 hp, running against the Porsche at 218 hp... would kick its ass. That's about a 25% difference in power in favor of the Tesla; also the Tesla weighs 2690 lbs, and the Porsche weighs 3300 lbs... another 18% win for the Tesla.
Yeah, I think the Tesla is a better car all around. Gasoline... LOL.
Here is the yearly climate chart for my region.
As is easily seen, it's been colder than normal for the last six months, we're ahead on precipitation, February was unusually cold in a very consistent streak, snow continued into late May, quite late as compared to normal, and here, in late July, the temperatures continue to reach below normal ranges consistently, with only occasional excursions above.
One region does not by any means a global climate make, but I'm afraid I still have to take issue with "it's been a scorcher for folks all around the world." Not in this part of the world, it hasn't.
It is? How? They're both cables with single connectors on each end. I fail to see how one is significantly more difficult than the other. And for the record, I have, and use, both.
You cart your laptop around to show movies? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that's atypical. Maybe its time to get dad some real AV gear, eh? You know, something you can slap a thumb drive into? Instead of... [laughing] your whole laptop?
Oh, I'm quite familiar with that. We have multiple XBox 360 parties here all the time. We have a dedicated ethernet switch for them as well as multiple monitors. I just don't think there's anything so awful about plugging in three colored RCA cables into the three matching colored jacks... plus an optical cable... plus an ethernet cable... as compared to a single HDMI cable and an ethernet cable. In fact, I think whining about it is kind of hilarious. What will you do when faced with something complex, like making a sandwich, tying your shoes or trying to shell some beauty out of her garters and camisole when she's gone and put her panties on first instead of last? ZOMG, look, it's TWO CABLES and FOUR PLUGS!
It has to do with HDMI vs. component. Not versus DVI. DVI is HDMI for video with better connectors. No real difference except the higher quality physical connection DVI offers. For audio, an optical or coaxial cable, and you're done. Trivial.
What do I care what you do? My interest is what you *claim*, because that influences others. Nothing wrong with analog (meaning component video) that isn't something done by fiat. Displays sync up to it faster (no key frames, and no negotiation, and no encraption (not a typo)), it can easily be spidered out to multiple monitors / switches, etc.
...[sad], [true] moderation selections.
Perhaps some day you will be able to apply that same intellect that allows you to detect snake oil in audio gear to the snake oil in sexual bigotry.
...pumped storage
...beer
Stealing has zero to do with "physical" and 100% to do with value. Your argument is completely without merit. The harm that stealing does is to take something of value from someone else without consent and/or recompense. If you drain someone's paypal account, you're not taking anything physical, you're just fiddling with numbers. But you're stealing because you're taking value directly. If you take a copy of software from them for nothing, where they only wish to part with it for recompense, you're increasing your value without compensating the creator. That's theft. If you take someone's virginity without their consent, you have stolen something irreplaceable, even if there is no physical change at all.
Theft is the act of appropriating value that you have no right to. It isn't the "picking up of something physical", and it has nothing to do with what you leave behind, either: It has to do with value you take away you have no right to. It's all about rights, and rights are things that you -- and a lot of other people -- have given very little serious thought to.
No. When you steal someone's stuff, you don't hurt them by making money. You hurt them because you took away THEIR opportunity to make money. You hurt them because you took valuable material from them. One copy's worth (for you) or a hundred (for your posse.) Either way, you're stealing. The only difference is the quantity. When you steal music or software, you are in possession of something you have NO right to. You are no better than any other thief.
No. No one pays BoingBoing because this image is there. They're not offering it for sale, or charging to view it. But BoingBoing benefits because they're not out of pocket, yet they can show the image. In the end, more money in BoingBoing's pocket because their status quo as a content site is maintained, without recompensing the artist. An indirect financial benefit consequent to the artist's work.
Likewise, typically no one pays an individual for stealing music for their own use; but the individual benefits because they're not out of pocket, yet they have the product. The individual's status quo as a "hip, I heard that" and a "happy, I enjoy that" individual is maintained, without recompensing the artist. In the end, considering the music is in hand, more money in pocket: an indirect financial benefit consequent to the artist's work.
There is zero ethical difference between these two; in both cases, the artist creates, the art is used, and the artist's payment is weaseled out of. There is zero ethical difference between taking a digital product against the producer's wishes and stealing a vase out of my company showroom.
When someone creates something, it is theirs to decide what to do with it. If they want to sell it, as a consumer, you get to ethically vote with your wallet: Buy, and support them; don't buy, and don't support them. However, if you take the a product that is not offered freely without meeting their terms... that's just stealing.
It's mildly entertaining to watch the excuse train pull up and unload the same tired arguments, but in the end, it is stealing. BoingBoing is no less and no more guilty of stealing here than any cluetard who steals commercial music of software products. The degree that they are financially and reasonably liable is probably very little (same as an individual downloader) because odds are no one can show that they did any more or less business because that image was there... but ethically, they shit the bed just as badly as someone stealing jewelry.
If you want free pictures, you can start by going and visiting my flickr account. I don't use CC; I claim copyright only so I can specify that the rights are handed out, and allow unlimited use of any kind. If you want free software, go where the software is offered for free. I write free software, too (really free, not GPL [free unless you redistribute, then must do what we tell you.]) There are many more like me.
If free is your price, then that's where you should be looking: Products that are intended to be free for the uses you will make of them and explicitly say so. If you want a product that the creator deems only available for a specific exchange, either (A) make that exchange or (B) become a thief. There are no other options. You can, of course, add the "I'll make excuses" flag, but you're still firmly in column A or B.
Resolving detail on planets in other solar systems is technically feasible. Blurring is not inherent in the process, as it is with telescopes on the ground -- there's no atmosphere or other randomly distorting factor between there and our solar system, where the observing system would be; nor is the technology prone to blurring. Also, you're wrong (again) about the comparability of the baselines; there's very little practical limit on the baseline of a space-based LBII; there's no technical reason whatsoever such a baseline couldn't be as much as a lightyear. With a (synthesized) aperture of that size, detail of targets 10...100 light years out would be very good indeed. All it takes is time to position the instruments, and time to manufacture them. Once the initial manufacturing investment is made, more and more instruments could be added on a continuing basis at no cost. That's what we ought to be doing.
Occultation and wobble don't tell us anything we need to know beyond what we already knew, which is, planets are everywhere.
Your argument that other telescopes "need" Kepler... I'm not buying that. We already knew other stars had planets. Kepler is going to ID some that are smaller. Not if they are habitable, mind you, just smaller. Without knowing more, this information isn't very useful.
What we really need to know - and do not know now - is if there are planets out there that are supporting life. As we know it, or otherwise. In order to do that, yes, we need spectroscopic readouts of the light bouncing off of planets, not the light coming directly from the stars.
So what does that call for? The ability to see light reflected from those planets. And how can we do that, while also gaining the ability to resolve everything else better as well? I already told you. But all you can concentrate on, it seems, is Kepler.
Very few people are as pro-science as I am. I just hate to see money spent on half-assed projects, and the more so when they're on the expensive side, as Kepler was.
We should be in space. Already. We should be mining and refining materials from asteroids. Perhaps we shouldn't even be mining materials here, at all. Mining on earth is rarely environmentally friendly.
We should not be fucking around in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we should not go into Iran (though the odds favor exactly that.) We waste so much of our resources that could be going to actually inform and enlighten us that it literally makes me ill to think about it. And then sometimes we spend what little we get in the science budget very poorly.
Hubble was (and remains) a great instrument, returning tons of new data for the money. Kepler isn't. When the mission started, we knew there were tons of planets out there. When it ends, we're going to know the same thing, only with the codicil that some of them are earth sized. Which, really, we also already knew -- because our system has 3, or 4, depending on how you like to set your bounds.
We need to get off the surface here. Robotically. It should have been done years ago. It should already be ongoing. But it isn't. And that's because our "leaders" are some of the dumbest sheepfuckers ever fielded by an ignorant and deluded citizenry. The resources we could be retrieving... the structures and instruments we could be fielding... the reduced strain on our own environment... all crippled because we waste our substance in all the wrong directions. Then the little bit we manage to get for science... goes into projects that we're not going to get anything meaningful out of. Damn, it's frustrating.
Sounds to me like you've been the victim of disinformation designed to keep you from wanting to better yourself. But hey. Maybe they really would make you unhappy. Maybe you're just that dysfunctional that you couldn't handle wealth.