are you attempting to alienate ~90% of the world population.(sic)
Doesn't concern me a bit. Religious drones need it ground into their foreheads in letters of indelible ink until even the most fearful, gullible, and just plain stupid among them get it: Science works, religion does not. It's time to face it. Time to leave the ghost stories behind. Time to show the "religious leaders" for what they are, fairy story artists with palm leaves and dowsing rods and some really poorly written old fictions and no more than that. Time to point at every world leader - American, Iranian, etc. - who uses "gawd" as an excuse and call bullshit in no uncertain terms. Time to point at the Muslims who want to kill that lady teacher for naming the teddy bear "Mohammed" and call them ignorant savages, because that's just what they are. Time to point at the pope, blathering along, blaming the world's ills on atheists, and call him the ignorant savage he is.
As for slashdot moderation, you see, the thing about that is - it doesn't work. Because there is no accountability, because bad moderation is never reversed, because reading at anything other than -1 causes the loss of many great posts, no serious slashdot user reads at anything but -1; the rest are posers and aren't even seeing the conversation. So I really don't care what the mods do.
Mind you, if they *fixed* the mod system, you'd have a point. But experience has shown that they aren't going to do that. So - you don't.
Yeah. It's pretty unstable, though. There are earthquakes, some of them severe in recent memory, such as the mag. 7.5 quake of 1959... Doesn't seem like a really great idea to site a bunch of generators in such a place.
We've got hot springs in the NE portion of Montana in areas that haven't seen serious quake or volcanic activity in tens of thousands of years. That's the kind of place you want to look for the helium isotope, because if you find it, you've got a decent chance of the plant lasting more than a few decades. This stuff is expensive to build, and to wire.
The algorithm has been extensively critiqued and found to be strong.
...and if the NSA could crack AES-128, what would you expect to hear from them and any security-cleared academics involved? Let me lay it out for you bluntly. They'd say something along the lines of "The algorithm has been extensively critiqued and found to be strong."
Also, there's quite a difference between what Dr. Joe Honest, working on his stipend until 4pm each day with what he, his TA, and his mighty 3 GHz windows or linux machine can do, and an organization that has billions in budget normally, can get more anytime they ask, no difficult goals but breaking encryption and signal intercept, and which has made it a point to hire as many of the best minds in encryption as possible for, oh, say the last fifty years or so. And this in a world where quantum attacks are thought to be only a matter of sufficiently developed technology.
Personally, I think if you depend upon encryption, someone, somewhere, is quite likely to be archiving your data in the clear. Even if the decrypt mechanism "trick" involved was no more complicated than scooping your OTP off your computer without your knowledge. Which we all know cannot happen. (cough.)
If you want security from generic canvasing of your data, put it on a machine that has no network connection, and ensure that said machine has considerable physical security, right up to and including a Faraday cage. It won't stop anyone who physically comes after you, but your data will remain unscanned as long as you remain of no interest to the authorities. Past that point, you could wake up and find your Faraday cage missing, computer and all.:-)
And of course, nothing so quaint as that old-world concept of a "warrant" will impede them.
We own an ipod touch. Trust me, it's no e-reader. Not unless your eyes are spaced about two centimeters apart and you prefer reading sentences six words in length, that is.
Amazon's creation is much better - it has a form factor and resolution that (just barely) provides booklike readability (for text.) It's simply too expensive.
Equal voting rights don't work because people aren't equal. It's just that simple. There is no possible system designed around equal voting rights that won't succumb to the fact that half the voters are idiots and a significant proportion of those on the other side of the bell curve, the non-idiots if you like, are uninformed or misinformed. Either people must be assigned to deal with issues who have the skills and knowledge to deal with those issues, or the issues will only be correctly dealt with as a matter of random chance.
The idea of equal voting rights of elected representatives or the general public is directly equivalent to letting anyone into a science lab to turn knobs, pour regents, sniff petri dishes, and wave lasers around. Only lab accidents usually only affect the local area. Accidents in congress - like the USAPATRIOT act - damage the entire country at one go. As do mishaps and errors in the executive and judiciary branches.
It doesn't help a whit if citizens "know" their representatives. The only thing that can help is if your representatives know what they are doing. Since the citizens don't, generally speaking, they have no basis to use as selection criteria for representatives.
None of this even matters in our current society because all legislation is based upon corporate or SIG needs and desires, or direct attempts to manipulate the populace and eliminate liberties via scare tactics (for the children, for your safety, there are terrorists at the gate, etc.)
Again, the only solution to the current situation is some form of rigid constitutional meritocracy. Odds are we won't get anywhere near such a thing; and if not, I confidently expect our society to fall of its own weight within just a few decades. Not with a bang - no revolution - I just expect it to fall apart. We're already completely broke and indebted as a country, we've allowed our manufacturing base to fall to pitiful levels under pressure from unions, other countries have done a good job of catching up to our one remaining lead in the IT based industry, our currency is inflating and our cost of living rising while our wages remain relatively stagnant, our liberties have been pared down to the bare minimum (and those that remain are mostly illusory - even freedom of speech is now a matter of governmental discretion.)
Local political issues are one thing; but if the underlying foundation falls apart, there's going to be a disaster of monumental proportions. A few days without food is all it takes to go from an orderly society to a completely savage free for all. The food banks are drying up right now. Things are not going well.
As long as you live there, it is still your moral duty to vote - using write-ins if needed.
I'm voting for Ron Paul. Because I actually believe he'll stop the war of aggression. I think he'll be absolutely powerless in the face of congress as currently constituted, however, I have this fantasy that he'll use "fireside chats" to explain to the citizens what the constitution is, why the government should be following it, and the citizens in turn will pressure their representatives. That's just before one, or both, of the political parties (or the powers behind them) has him assassinated, of course. Hopefully before he has any chance to try to dismantle social security or derail the trend towards considering the health of the citizens as something actually on the same level of concern as roads and education.
Normally, I would not vote, because voting implies you believe in and support the system, and I do not. The system has produced a dictatorship where the government simply consults itself for the granting of powers not actually given to it by the citizens, or to completely go around restrictions placed upon it by the citizens; further, it has used those powers against the citizens, and continues to do so. Participation in the current system will (generally speaking) perpetrate it. I think it would be best if it were replaced with some kind of constitutionally restricted meritocracy with a fast feedback mechanism to punish constitutional violations severely.
Democracy: Where any two uninformed citizens outvote a citizen who is an expert on the issue at hand.
Republic: Where all three votes are irrelevant, because only uninformed "representatives" can vote on issues.
No, the other 99% of the population is sprawled on their couch, eagerly consuming the news about Britney Spears and blindly swallowing the propaganda on Faux News.
I *really* don't think you can make an argument that your average person will put out $400 for an e-reader. I seriously can't see that happening. You're pulling from the subgroup that consists of avid readers, perhaps with a smattering of pure gadget freaks. And the fellow you replied to is a member of that subgroup. He's probably representative of the majority of them. You ask a reader if they enjoy browsing in a good bookstore, and they'll probably bend your ear half off. What a good bookstore *means* varies; for me, it's always been Powell's technical bookstore in Portland, Oregon; for him, it's an antique bookstore; for others it may be Barnes and Noble or a used paperback bookstore... but my guess is that almost every book fan will have a story about the delights of browsing a bookstore that suits their interests. Where I live, there are no bookstores. I'm about 300 miles from the nearest city (and most of you wouldn't even call Billings, Montana much a city.) So I do a lot of book shopping on Amazon and other online booksellers. It's not the same. I can browse a hundred book titles in seconds across a bookshelf; a list on Amazon is hugely clumsy by comparison. When I get to a real bookstore, you might as well leave me there all day, and I'm going to spend some serious money.
e-readers have a long way to go to dig into this market. IMHO.
I gave up on The Independent shortly after they decided to become an anti-government attack-dog instead of a newspaper.
Funny... I had a very similar experience. I gave up on my government when it became an anti-citizen attack dog instead of a government. You know what I mean... surveillance everywhere they can get away with it, individual liberties trampled upon, wars against personal choices and lifestyles, arbitrary re-writes and censorship of science, shilling press conferences, pursuing wars of aggression where no threat existed, trampling the country's constitution, creating several generations worth of debt load for my descendants, stealing people's property for the benefit of commercial interests, making legislation for corporate and SIG benefit and not the people... yep, a very similar experience indeed.
At 21, were you used to communicating with people via the internet? What e-mail provider did you use? How often did you order products online?
At 21, I was fooling with surplus modems (acoustic couplers...) with a friend, we sent mail using Baudot teletypes over ham radio (RTTY mode), and we ordered from catalogs. I had published my first technical article in Kilobaud, built a custom FM front end design for Pioneer, and had built several computers, starting with an 8008 and working up to an SC/MP and a 6800, if recollection serves.
Age is no barrier to change unless you wish to claim it as an excuse.
I said I read PDFs on my laptop, full color and etc. I've even done a little bit of reading on my palm T|X, and I've been known to surf the web on my PSP, though I find that rather painful, frankly. What age is doing here is providing a huge collection of extremely pleasant book reading experiences that I am, frankly, loathe to walk away from.
Give me an e-reader that can do what a book can - full color, allows me to keep my purchases in as secure a manner as possible, won't break if I drop it or is trivially replaceable (not at $400, sorry), and I think I'd wobble over towards the e-reader zone, as it were. Right now, it seems to me that the technology basically represents a giant step backwards. And yes, I'm aware of the bookmarking and so forth that an e-reader offers; that's great, but it isn't enough.
do you know what it's like to be able to bring 80 books with you on a long business trip?
Sure. I have a recent vintage Macbook Pro laptop with several hundred gigs of storage. Got quite a few books on it, too. Not to mention all the other usual things. Music. Games. Productivity. Custom stuff. e-books aren't bringing portable electronic books to the table as a new thing, or as a unique capability. I like to read "Motion Mountain" for entertainment (a physics e-text.) I also read a lot of our clients books in electronic format (I own a literary agency.) I'm not in the least unfamiliar with the territory. I just think it's still a frontier, is all. And not one I care to be a path-breaker in. I'll watch you do it.:-)
The only difference is that these devices have batteries that will last for weeks of regular reading and they have displays that don't cause eye strain.
Well, that, and if you drop them, you lose everything you have, as well as a $400 reader. Drop a book and pick it up and you're back where you started. Even if you drop it off a sixth story balcony. Finding it may be a problem, though.:-)
Seems like just a little effort and they could side light it with a few LEDs and a well chosen bezel. Separate battery for the light, maybe. White LEDs are getting fairly amazing in output and efficiency.
Re your age, I think you're naturally a little more flexible about this than I am. Ok, it's not just flexibility, I'm downright cranky.:-)
Well, one thing you can't get - yet - is a laptop that'll go thirty hours on a charge that only takes two hours to get. Another is this is designed to read, and ergonomically speaking, it's easier to handle than a computer for reading purposes.
Other than that, yeah, $400, four grey levels, 256 MB of (expandable) storage, much easier to break than a book, and if you break it, you lose ALL your books, and the other shoe for DRM hasn't dropped (and sadly, I think it will)... laptops are MUCH more general, and they do fabulous color...
No, I don't think you're missing anything in particular. Bezos, I think, has missed a few things, but that's only my measly little opinion.
Basically zero. They generally don't change reflectivity/brightness very fast, on purpose. A static electrical charge will keep them in a particular display state, at least the ones I've read about. Saves energy. A good thing for these designs.
However, at $400 a pop, I think this is another "Segway" of e-books. Sell the reader for $9.99 and make up the cost on the media, then you've got something. $400? Heck, I could drop $400 on one just because I wanted to, but I won't. Doesn't feel like I'm doing anything to do with books at $400. I like books, anyway. They're tough, you own them, you can do the usual things as compared to any physical possession, and they have a delightful physicality to them.
The experience of an e-book is no foreign thing, either; I've got numerous volumes in PDF on my laptop, full color illustrations, etc... just isn't the same.
I will own up to being a book freak, though. The next generation may completely lack my preference for the real thing. We'll see.
As for the 600mm, at f/8 and no tracking, it isn't a practical astronomical telescope, that, I can promise. Works for the moon because it's so bright, that's all.:-)
Canon's got an f/1.2 50 mm L lens, but that thing is vewwwwy pricey... methinks f/1.8 will have to do.
Obama is not the run-of-the-mill candidate either.
Oh, come on. Obama, and Paul for that matter, are superstitious bible-beating maniacs just like all the rest of the candidates. Both of them promote major platform elements that are every bit as insane, invasive, backwards and anti-liberty as every other candidate up there. Even if that were not so, even if I were completely wrong about that, even if they were the perfect candidate, whatever that is, there is very little they can do against a congress and a senate and an entrenched bureaucracy the size of a small country filled with morons like ted stevens and his comrades. The system really is totally out of hand, and while it may offend your sensibilities greatly to hear it, no amount of denial is going to change it, and no election of a single public office is going to change it, either.
I agree, and would add that in modern society, individuals want results now. McDonalds. FedEx. Instant Credit. Buy now, pay later.
What this leads to is a complete lack of appreciation for process, and a complete unwillingness to enter into any process that takes longer than swiping a credit card.
As a martial arts instructor, one of the most common inquiries I encounter (in one form or another) is "how long before I am promoted?", to which I answer, "That's an interesting question — to answer it, the first thing I need to know from you is, how soon are you going to be proficient in everything required for promotion?"
Between no feeling of control and little interest in, or understanding of, anything that takes concerted effort, I would say it is entirely fair to say that people's attitudes today - quite aside from material status and technological empowerment — are manifestly different from the days of the American revolution, and that apathy isn't an unexpected consequence when faced with large, sluggish issues.
There seems to be quite a bit of interest in this, rapidly closing in on 4,000 views as of 8pm, so I'll just point out a couple of other "bare camera" shots of the night sky; I've been experimenting as to what you can capture with just a camera - no telescope - here are some of the results:
Also, re your remark about post processing, I did three and only three things:
1) I used levels to push very faint background stars and sensor noise (which is fairly significant at ISO 3200) down towards or into black;
2) I pushed the color saturation up by about double to bring out the colors of the stars.
3) I clipped the portion of the image containing the comet and a few stars out and posted that fragment only, as opposed to the entire 10 megapixel shot.
None of which affected the capture of the comet in any significant manner. It isn't reflecting any particular color, so the change in saturation had no effect. The comet is quite bright, so pushing down the bottom-most brightness levels only served to trim a few pixels at the darkest edges of the comet. It appears just a trifle larger in the original.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't concern me a bit. Religious drones need it ground into their foreheads in letters of indelible ink until even the most fearful, gullible, and just plain stupid among them get it: Science works, religion does not. It's time to face it. Time to leave the ghost stories behind. Time to show the "religious leaders" for what they are, fairy story artists with palm leaves and dowsing rods and some really poorly written old fictions and no more than that. Time to point at every world leader - American, Iranian, etc. - who uses "gawd" as an excuse and call bullshit in no uncertain terms. Time to point at the Muslims who want to kill that lady teacher for naming the teddy bear "Mohammed" and call them ignorant savages, because that's just what they are. Time to point at the pope, blathering along, blaming the world's ills on atheists, and call him the ignorant savage he is.
As for slashdot moderation, you see, the thing about that is - it doesn't work. Because there is no accountability, because bad moderation is never reversed, because reading at anything other than -1 causes the loss of many great posts, no serious slashdot user reads at anything but -1; the rest are posers and aren't even seeing the conversation. So I really don't care what the mods do.
Mind you, if they *fixed* the mod system, you'd have a point. But experience has shown that they aren't going to do that. So - you don't.
Yeah. It's pretty unstable, though. There are earthquakes, some of them severe in recent memory, such as the mag. 7.5 quake of 1959... Doesn't seem like a really great idea to site a bunch of generators in such a place.
We've got hot springs in the NE portion of Montana in areas that haven't seen serious quake or volcanic activity in tens of thousands of years. That's the kind of place you want to look for the helium isotope, because if you find it, you've got a decent chance of the plant lasting more than a few decades. This stuff is expensive to build, and to wire.
We could just pray to find the geothermal sources.
Except that doesn't work.
Superstition is crap. Science works, bitches.
Exactly. How I miss Douglas Adams.
"Scientists create Zombie Cockroaches"
Yes, and then we elect them. Wake me up when the system changes.
The problem is one person's propaganda is another's opinion - and the 1st amendment is (further) at risk.
Never been to www.foxnews.com, then?
Also, there's quite a difference between what Dr. Joe Honest, working on his stipend until 4pm each day with what he, his TA, and his mighty 3 GHz windows or linux machine can do, and an organization that has billions in budget normally, can get more anytime they ask, no difficult goals but breaking encryption and signal intercept, and which has made it a point to hire as many of the best minds in encryption as possible for, oh, say the last fifty years or so. And this in a world where quantum attacks are thought to be only a matter of sufficiently developed technology.
Personally, I think if you depend upon encryption, someone, somewhere, is quite likely to be archiving your data in the clear. Even if the decrypt mechanism "trick" involved was no more complicated than scooping your OTP off your computer without your knowledge. Which we all know cannot happen. (cough.)
If you want security from generic canvasing of your data, put it on a machine that has no network connection, and ensure that said machine has considerable physical security, right up to and including a Faraday cage. It won't stop anyone who physically comes after you, but your data will remain unscanned as long as you remain of no interest to the authorities. Past that point, you could wake up and find your Faraday cage missing, computer and all. :-)
And of course, nothing so quaint as that old-world concept of a "warrant" will impede them.
We own an ipod touch. Trust me, it's no e-reader. Not unless your eyes are spaced about two centimeters apart and you prefer reading sentences six words in length, that is.
Amazon's creation is much better - it has a form factor and resolution that (just barely) provides booklike readability (for text.) It's simply too expensive.
Equal voting rights don't work because people aren't equal. It's just that simple. There is no possible system designed around equal voting rights that won't succumb to the fact that half the voters are idiots and a significant proportion of those on the other side of the bell curve, the non-idiots if you like, are uninformed or misinformed. Either people must be assigned to deal with issues who have the skills and knowledge to deal with those issues, or the issues will only be correctly dealt with as a matter of random chance.
The idea of equal voting rights of elected representatives or the general public is directly equivalent to letting anyone into a science lab to turn knobs, pour regents, sniff petri dishes, and wave lasers around. Only lab accidents usually only affect the local area. Accidents in congress - like the USAPATRIOT act - damage the entire country at one go. As do mishaps and errors in the executive and judiciary branches.
It doesn't help a whit if citizens "know" their representatives. The only thing that can help is if your representatives know what they are doing. Since the citizens don't, generally speaking, they have no basis to use as selection criteria for representatives.
None of this even matters in our current society because all legislation is based upon corporate or SIG needs and desires, or direct attempts to manipulate the populace and eliminate liberties via scare tactics (for the children, for your safety, there are terrorists at the gate, etc.)
Again, the only solution to the current situation is some form of rigid constitutional meritocracy. Odds are we won't get anywhere near such a thing; and if not, I confidently expect our society to fall of its own weight within just a few decades. Not with a bang - no revolution - I just expect it to fall apart. We're already completely broke and indebted as a country, we've allowed our manufacturing base to fall to pitiful levels under pressure from unions, other countries have done a good job of catching up to our one remaining lead in the IT based industry, our currency is inflating and our cost of living rising while our wages remain relatively stagnant, our liberties have been pared down to the bare minimum (and those that remain are mostly illusory - even freedom of speech is now a matter of governmental discretion.)
Local political issues are one thing; but if the underlying foundation falls apart, there's going to be a disaster of monumental proportions. A few days without food is all it takes to go from an orderly society to a completely savage free for all. The food banks are drying up right now. Things are not going well.
I'm voting for Ron Paul. Because I actually believe he'll stop the war of aggression. I think he'll be absolutely powerless in the face of congress as currently constituted, however, I have this fantasy that he'll use "fireside chats" to explain to the citizens what the constitution is, why the government should be following it, and the citizens in turn will pressure their representatives. That's just before one, or both, of the political parties (or the powers behind them) has him assassinated, of course. Hopefully before he has any chance to try to dismantle social security or derail the trend towards considering the health of the citizens as something actually on the same level of concern as roads and education.
Normally, I would not vote, because voting implies you believe in and support the system, and I do not. The system has produced a dictatorship where the government simply consults itself for the granting of powers not actually given to it by the citizens, or to completely go around restrictions placed upon it by the citizens; further, it has used those powers against the citizens, and continues to do so. Participation in the current system will (generally speaking) perpetrate it. I think it would be best if it were replaced with some kind of constitutionally restricted meritocracy with a fast feedback mechanism to punish constitutional violations severely.
Democracy: Where any two uninformed citizens outvote a citizen who is an expert on the issue at hand.
Republic: Where all three votes are irrelevant, because only uninformed "representatives" can vote on issues.
2nd page of the article, 5th paragraph: "$399"
No, the other 99% of the population is sprawled on their couch, eagerly consuming the news about Britney Spears and blindly swallowing the propaganda on Faux News.
I *really* don't think you can make an argument that your average person will put out $400 for an e-reader. I seriously can't see that happening. You're pulling from the subgroup that consists of avid readers, perhaps with a smattering of pure gadget freaks. And the fellow you replied to is a member of that subgroup. He's probably representative of the majority of them. You ask a reader if they enjoy browsing in a good bookstore, and they'll probably bend your ear half off. What a good bookstore *means* varies; for me, it's always been Powell's technical bookstore in Portland, Oregon; for him, it's an antique bookstore; for others it may be Barnes and Noble or a used paperback bookstore... but my guess is that almost every book fan will have a story about the delights of browsing a bookstore that suits their interests. Where I live, there are no bookstores. I'm about 300 miles from the nearest city (and most of you wouldn't even call Billings, Montana much a city.) So I do a lot of book shopping on Amazon and other online booksellers. It's not the same. I can browse a hundred book titles in seconds across a bookshelf; a list on Amazon is hugely clumsy by comparison. When I get to a real bookstore, you might as well leave me there all day, and I'm going to spend some serious money.
e-readers have a long way to go to dig into this market. IMHO.
Funny... I had a very similar experience. I gave up on my government when it became an anti-citizen attack dog instead of a government. You know what I mean... surveillance everywhere they can get away with it, individual liberties trampled upon, wars against personal choices and lifestyles, arbitrary re-writes and censorship of science, shilling press conferences, pursuing wars of aggression where no threat existed, trampling the country's constitution, creating several generations worth of debt load for my descendants, stealing people's property for the benefit of commercial interests, making legislation for corporate and SIG benefit and not the people... yep, a very similar experience indeed.
At 21, I was fooling with surplus modems (acoustic couplers...) with a friend, we sent mail using Baudot teletypes over ham radio (RTTY mode), and we ordered from catalogs. I had published my first technical article in Kilobaud, built a custom FM front end design for Pioneer, and had built several computers, starting with an 8008 and working up to an SC/MP and a 6800, if recollection serves.
I said I read PDFs on my laptop, full color and etc. I've even done a little bit of reading on my palm T|X, and I've been known to surf the web on my PSP, though I find that rather painful, frankly. What age is doing here is providing a huge collection of extremely pleasant book reading experiences that I am, frankly, loathe to walk away from.
Give me an e-reader that can do what a book can - full color, allows me to keep my purchases in as secure a manner as possible, won't break if I drop it or is trivially replaceable (not at $400, sorry), and I think I'd wobble over towards the e-reader zone, as it were. Right now, it seems to me that the technology basically represents a giant step backwards. And yes, I'm aware of the bookmarking and so forth that an e-reader offers; that's great, but it isn't enough.
Sure. I have a recent vintage Macbook Pro laptop with several hundred gigs of storage. Got quite a few books on it, too. Not to mention all the other usual things. Music. Games. Productivity. Custom stuff. e-books aren't bringing portable electronic books to the table as a new thing, or as a unique capability. I like to read "Motion Mountain" for entertainment (a physics e-text.) I also read a lot of our clients books in electronic format (I own a literary agency.) I'm not in the least unfamiliar with the territory. I just think it's still a frontier, is all. And not one I care to be a path-breaker in. I'll watch you do it. :-)
Well, that, and if you drop them, you lose everything you have, as well as a $400 reader. Drop a book and pick it up and you're back where you started. Even if you drop it off a sixth story balcony. Finding it may be a problem, though. :-)
Seems like just a little effort and they could side light it with a few LEDs and a well chosen bezel. Separate battery for the light, maybe. White LEDs are getting fairly amazing in output and efficiency.
Re your age, I think you're naturally a little more flexible about this than I am. Ok, it's not just flexibility, I'm downright cranky. :-)
Well, one thing you can't get - yet - is a laptop that'll go thirty hours on a charge that only takes two hours to get. Another is this is designed to read, and ergonomically speaking, it's easier to handle than a computer for reading purposes.
Other than that, yeah, $400, four grey levels, 256 MB of (expandable) storage, much easier to break than a book, and if you break it, you lose ALL your books, and the other shoe for DRM hasn't dropped (and sadly, I think it will)... laptops are MUCH more general, and they do fabulous color...
No, I don't think you're missing anything in particular. Bezos, I think, has missed a few things, but that's only my measly little opinion.
Ok, one question then: How old are you?
I'm 51; to say that I am habituated to books - physical ones - is to understate the case rather severely.
Basically zero. They generally don't change reflectivity/brightness very fast, on purpose. A static electrical charge will keep them in a particular display state, at least the ones I've read about. Saves energy. A good thing for these designs.
However, at $400 a pop, I think this is another "Segway" of e-books. Sell the reader for $9.99 and make up the cost on the media, then you've got something. $400? Heck, I could drop $400 on one just because I wanted to, but I won't. Doesn't feel like I'm doing anything to do with books at $400. I like books, anyway. They're tough, you own them, you can do the usual things as compared to any physical possession, and they have a delightful physicality to them.
The experience of an e-book is no foreign thing, either; I've got numerous volumes in PDF on my laptop, full color illustrations, etc... just isn't the same.
I will own up to being a book freak, though. The next generation may completely lack my preference for the real thing. We'll see.
So... you don't watch television, then?
Thanks for your kind words.
As for the 600mm, at f/8 and no tracking, it isn't a practical astronomical telescope, that, I can promise. Works for the moon because it's so bright, that's all. :-)
Canon's got an f/1.2 50 mm L lens, but that thing is vewwwwy pricey... methinks f/1.8 will have to do.
Oh, come on. Obama, and Paul for that matter, are superstitious bible-beating maniacs just like all the rest of the candidates. Both of them promote major platform elements that are every bit as insane, invasive, backwards and anti-liberty as every other candidate up there. Even if that were not so, even if I were completely wrong about that, even if they were the perfect candidate, whatever that is, there is very little they can do against a congress and a senate and an entrenched bureaucracy the size of a small country filled with morons like ted stevens and his comrades. The system really is totally out of hand, and while it may offend your sensibilities greatly to hear it, no amount of denial is going to change it, and no election of a single public office is going to change it, either.
I agree, and would add that in modern society, individuals want results now. McDonalds. FedEx. Instant Credit. Buy now, pay later.
What this leads to is a complete lack of appreciation for process, and a complete unwillingness to enter into any process that takes longer than swiping a credit card.
As a martial arts instructor, one of the most common inquiries I encounter (in one form or another) is "how long before I am promoted?", to which I answer, "That's an interesting question — to answer it, the first thing I need to know from you is, how soon are you going to be proficient in everything required for promotion?"
Between no feeling of control and little interest in, or understanding of, anything that takes concerted effort, I would say it is entirely fair to say that people's attitudes today - quite aside from material status and technological empowerment — are manifestly different from the days of the American revolution, and that apathy isn't an unexpected consequence when faced with large, sluggish issues.
There seems to be quite a bit of interest in this, rapidly closing in on 4,000 views as of 8pm, so I'll just point out a couple of other "bare camera" shots of the night sky; I've been experimenting as to what you can capture with just a camera - no telescope - here are some of the results:
And with the right lens, you can go a good distance the other way. this fellow is about 1/20th of an inch across; found him on our aquarium wall. :-)
Also, re your remark about post processing, I did three and only three things:
1) I used levels to push very faint background stars and sensor noise (which is fairly significant at ISO 3200) down towards or into black;
2) I pushed the color saturation up by about double to bring out the colors of the stars.
3) I clipped the portion of the image containing the comet and a few stars out and posted that fragment only, as opposed to the entire 10 megapixel shot.
None of which affected the capture of the comet in any significant manner. It isn't reflecting any particular color, so the change in saturation had no effect. The comet is quite bright, so pushing down the bottom-most brightness levels only served to trim a few pixels at the darkest edges of the comet. It appears just a trifle larger in the original.