Privacy is erected by the mutual knowledge of a boundary. That's all it takes to create it. You can violate it just as easily; if you're properly socialized, you won't, though. Society is rife with such boundaries.
What a lock, or bars, or encryption, or a threatening sign represents is hardening of a boundary. This doesn't make it any more or less of a boundary in terms of privacy, it just attempts to make it slightly more difficult for the poorly socialized - those who will not respect the boundaries the rest of us will - to cross. Doesn't always work, either.
There's an old saying, "locks are for honest people" that pays homage to the idea that a lock isn't by any means sufficient to secure a boundary. This is a clear warning that if you indeed wish to maintain your privacy, your family's private isolation from people who would not respect their health, safety, domicile, possessions - you had best be prepared to implement safeguards a great deal more potent than a lock.
That is why the constitution's 2nd amendment exists; in the case where the government fails to obey the boundaries laid out on paper in the constitution itself and refuses to change its ways, the idea is that the citizens won't just have more copies of the constitution to wave around - they'll have guns. The security of the free state, the entire collection of individuals, depends upon the government behaving properly. The state is all the people. The government is just some of the people. For the same reason that the security of the individual depends upon people not invading their persons, houses, papers, and effects, the security of the state as a whole depends on the government not doing it, either. There are boundaries; when they are crossed, there must be remedies.
Often, I'd rather have an actual *comment* than a rating; witness the fact that the post has already received an "overrated" mod. Doesn't do to get too excited about slash moderation, at least until, or unless, they take the broken part (the anonymous part) away. When people are accountable, they're a lot less likely to act stupidly.
The 4th amendment was written to protect the security of one's life, liberty and property, not privacy.
Yes? Then how do you explain that the constitution explicitly says you are to be secure in your papers? Do you somehow think this means that the content of the papers is not covered, but the paper itself is to be secure from... what, fire? Mold? Confiscation by a paper envelope manufacturer? It is very clear that even if it is easy to do, the government may not search your communications. The generalization to telephone communications is both natural and appropriate, as is the generalization to electronic communications. Email isn't very useful any longer due to the pathological neglect of the government, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be covered by the same blanket as your physical mail and your other papers are, regardless if the "paper' is vellum, papyrus, pressed wood pulp, stone tablets, or packets. Look here: The only thing that makes "papers" valuable, gives them a need to be secure, is what is on them. Your thoughts, ideas, messages, financial state, etc. We're not talking about unused Kleenex here. We're talking about what is on the paper when we say papers, not just the paper itself.
Easy does not mean OK. Until any free person understands that, they're literally dangerous to this society.
Constitutional limits were placed on government because it was the authors experience that governments without limits had a dependable history of abusing the citizens. These limits do indeed make it more difficult for the government to do the legitimate jobs that are assigned to it; this was known right up front. If course it'd be easier to apprehend criminals if we knew everything about everybody. But that also opens the door to other problems, and the authors of the constitution took care to explicitly prevent this. Or so they thought. They didn't anticipate the legal system as it stands today, I think that's safe to say. Nor the arguments put forth by those who think it is the government's job to protect/forbid them from everything ranging from failure to use a seatbelt to enemies that are not even known to specifically exist, no matter what the cost might be in liberty.
Considerably more germane to how the US is supposed to work than a religious quote, the constitution has this to say:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Notice how a warrant has to be issued describing the "place" to be searched. The beginning of the amendment specifies "houses", but the rest is more general - the implication is that your shed, your place of business, someone else's coffee kiosk or bench or "mailbox of letters" or "container of packets", all are protected against unreasonable search. What is unreasonable in this context? It's right there, just read it: "right of the people to be secure" - that's unreasonable to violate. If you're not secure, you've been violated unless (a) they have probable cause and (b) they have a warrant and that warrant is supported by oath or affirmation.
With regard to communication modalities, at the time, what they had for remote communications was basically paper. Please note the explicit constitutional reference to the security of papers. You could write something down and send it elsewhere. This is where the idea that your mail should be secure comes from. Well, today, we have other mechanisms. Do you think that in ANY rational world, if the authors of the first amendment knew that you could send messages over wires or through the air, that they would have said, "Oh, well, in that case, you have no right to be secure? You can't base such an argument on how "easy" it is to read such communications, because there's nothing as easy to read as the mail is.
Those authors weren't trying to enumerate the "only" places you were to be secure, they were trying to say you should be secure PERIOD unless... oath, probable cause, warrant. I read the "persons, houses, papers and effects" as a general set of guidelines that is broadly inclusive; that reading is particularly supported by "effects", because that word is about as non-explicit as you can get in the language of the day.
Privacy is the social boundary that the citizens agree shall not be crossed. Closed doors shall be knocked upon; locked or not. Skirts shall not be looked up, short or long. Envelopes shall not be opened, unless addressed to you. Diaries shall not be read except by explicit permission from the author. These things are all important cornerstones of how society works. Not a one of them carries the addendum "unless it is easy" because it is obvious to each and every one of us that the existence of such boundaries is what makes life as an individual reasonable.
To the extent that the government argues that "because it can", it should be allowed to, we are faced with an intrusion that is both antisocial and constitutionally wrongheaded, as well as, I would argue, constitutionally anticipated and explicitly forbidden.
With capacitors, the danger with a crash is an explosion.
No, it really isn't. There's this marvelous technology, instantiated in these crazy devices we call "fuses", see...
Seriously, all you have to do is fuse the array internally on a per-block basis, and any shorted module will blow the fuse(s) to its neighbors, and that's the end of it. No explosion. No nothing. Just pffft and some new fuses (which might take a service call, but heck, you just ran into someone else, that's the least of your problems.)
One of the many benefits of capacitor systems is that you can arrange them many ways for many varied benefits. Paralleled caps simply add, so there's no reason not to break a high energy system up into blocks, and many reasons to do so. Not the least of which is the above issue, but it also makes replacement and service less expensive, less complicated, and allows use of smaller, easier to manufacture parts. And of course it allows various kinds of charging models.
I'm inclined to trust the engineers. If I can think of it (and I am an engineer, but not that kind) then they've probably though of it a hundred times over. The main issue here is energy per unit volume, and to a lesser extent, per unit weight. When and if those issues are really solved, we're golden.
Sad to say, I can read Baudot by eye from paper tape. I can spot shifts in an instant. I can read ASCII too. And 8080, 6800, and 6809 hexadecimal binary representation. Sigh. It's been a long revolution for me.
Friend of mine used to whistle into his microphone (we're amateur radio operators, "hams") and make a baudot demodulator spit out a continuous stream of RY's. Freak.:-)
I still have a couple SWTPC KC tape controllers, they both still work - I had kind of a old computer fest here a few years back, wrote 6809, z80 and 6800 emulations, gathered up all my old software and so forth. Was interesting. I was able to recover every tape I'd made; I thought the oxide would fall off, but no, they played back fine. I even read back a paper tape of BASIC; now that was a bit of a flashback. I keep the paper tape in a sealed can. It's some kind of oiled paper, holding up very well indeed.
Come back when you have a better idea of what you're talking about.
Coming from you, with your boatload of misconceptions and bewilderment, that is actually quite funny. Thanks. You keep it up. One day that subscription to popular science will pay off for you.
Foveon implements multiple sensors, period, and using them for HDR is simply a matter of how they do dynamic range. Modern sensors are hitting 12...14 bits already; your eye is lucky to do eight with the iris at any one specific dilation. Most people are between 7 and 8 bits. Add your iris in, and you have a whole lot more, but that's not how we look at images.
As to whether they'll actually do HDR as a mode, I suspect they will. It is becoming surprisingly popular, considering how weird it makes images look.
The UN (or anybody else) didn't send in any troops, and there were no trade sanctions induced to make them think twice about what they were doing.
Well, just ask yourself: How much oil is there in Burma? And the answer is: Oil Production: 9500 Barrels Per Day (bbl/day) Oil Consumption: 20460 Barrels Per Day. Therefore, the monks die. But trust me, we are going to save Iraq. Yessir. We're gonna save it if it kills every last one of those locals, because they need to be saved. Might kill a few thousand of our soldiers, too, but there's no oil at their houses either, or they wouldn't be soldiers, so never mind all that.
I would have to say I agree with him on the kiosks, who has anything better than this?
I do. It's called a "hard drive" plus "backups", and said technology lets me keep my images around for display and printing on any hardware that comes along, hardware that will no doubt far exceed anything these kiosks you refer to can do today. In the meantime, LCD photo frames are fun, as is emailing images to the family. And of course, if we want prints, we can dump beautiful ones out in seconds using a photo printer that sits right here near the desk. Not that prints are desired very often.
Too late. It's already happened. Same location on chip, so the same sensor size, essentially three sensors at three different depths. Sigma SD14, for instance. Price is right in the prosumer zone.
I still have both the 320x240 and 640x480 Casio cameras; in fact, I have all my digital cameras. Must be twelve... maybe as many as fifteen of them. This is an area where up until recently, resale value just can't compete with technology. So everything got shelved and basically forgotten. Currently, I have a Canon EOS 40D, and that baby is fun !
Probably going to be stuck with Canon for a while too, lenses make the investment fairly specific. I just bought my first cadioptric lens, basically a reflector telescope (500 mm, fixed 1/f8) which also works for close focus macros. I have a 2x (to 1000 mm) converter for it, too. I bought it after a friend let me borrow his 600 mm Sigma cadioptric and I was able to easily, nay, trivially, shoot this picture of the moon. Haven't tried my new one on that yet, it's solid overcast here. Sigh.
Pournelle was definitely one of the specific reasons I let my subscription to Byte run out. I had never read so much wrongheaded nonsense in one place until I encountered his column. Eventually I began to feel that any organization that paid that man for his opinions (as opposed to his fiction, which I generally like, especially if Niven is around to make it *really* good) wasn't going to get any more of my money.
At least that crazy wacko in Kilobaud was fun to read. It was like a print version of Art Bell. Pornelle was just... dreary.
I don't mean to rain on your parade, but what do you plug your console into, if not the tube?:)
Damn rain. Going to pull the "getting technical" card on me, eh? Well, I raise you a 205" 1080p projection system for gaming, DVD, Blueray and HD-DVD. No tube involved (well... there's the projection lamp, I suppose. Umph.) We only watch broadcast (satellite) TV in the bathtub, there's a good sized Toshiba HD tube screen in there, along with a Dish DVR which saves our TV fare, such as it is, for those moments when we can slide under the water at a moment's warning. So as it turns out, the consoles aren't plugged into "the tube."
Except you can't. I'm desperately searching Google, MSN and Yahoo! for anything about my county's local bond election. Or that big, scandalous local meth bust. Nothin' doin'.
I'm in a rural town in Montana. Both the local paper and the local radio station have extensive web sites. As well as the local government and any number of local businesses, plus there is a general town commercial site.
And of course, meth busts aren't for people who can read anyway; the drug war is free job security for politicians courtesy of those voters who don't have the sense to pour piss out of a boot, much less read, along with the various other wars against our right to make personal choices.
I don't think your local bond election is very likely to involve a slew of issues that would get you into an argument at your local print shop about the UCR level, either. "Say, Mac, this pile of sewer pipes don't really 'pop', off da page, y'know?" Still, you're looking at opportunities there. Pictures work with these people. Especially if they're taken with the proper slant. The thing is, there's no pressing need for these pictures to be in print; plus the whole process or printing limited time value material is environmentally unsound.
The Web completely sucks at delivering that kind of audience.
No, it really doesn't. People just need to know to look. Around here, we know to look. We even know where to look. It isn't that hard to get across. The local radio station, billboards, mentions from the church pulpit or at the local Elks club... no more challenging than any other job of local marketing. Sounds to me like your town is a wide-open business opportunity. There are still quite a few areas ripe for bringing into the modern world. I didn't say print was dead, remember. I said it was declining.
I would suggest the reason your product might not be going gangbusters in the print-oriented market
I'm sorry, you misread what I wrote. I said that a lot of our print people no longer did print, and that relatively fewer people contact us about print matters. That's something else entirely.
Even email seems to be falling by the wayside.
I would agree whole-heartedly with this. Email as a general tool is on its last legs. We use direct delivery from the webserver's contact forms to otherwise unconnected email boxes; we get exactly 0% spam. Sending email is something else entirely. Well, something will come along to replace this, too, eventually. The whole "we trust each other vibe" that a lot of the net started with wasn't a very good idea, sad to say.
The thing is, print and prepress are steeply declining. Magazines are getting thinner, readership is dropping for everything from porn to popular science; why pay for month old news and views when you can get it tonight, for free, up to the second, on the web?
We spent literally years building extensive prepress into our products until we had a more flexible and more powerful model than Photoshop had, something able to flex further and simply get a better print result by virtue of better control over the various print issues like allowing a mix of UCR and GCR approaches, more flexible and easier to use color separation models; and it used to be that a lot of our customers were very into getting that last bit of quality through the printshop and onto the paper.
No longer. Our userbase continues to increase, but a goodly number of our old print customers have moved on to web-centric undertakings and we hear from relatively fewer new print people. I can't say I'm disappointed, a prepress person tends to need a lot more care and support than a web designer does, all other things being equal.
The problem that a company like Adobe faces is that very little of what Photoshop does is all that hard to find in less expensive software. Apple knows this; buying Adobe would simply be buying a name, because the underlying technology is no mystery to anyone. Apple's already facing Adobe directly with the Aperture / Lightroom product pair - if Apple wants an imaging product, there are comparably powerful engines out there already, or they could devote a couple of savvy imaging people and a GUI person to the project and they'd have something significant in a year or so. As opposed to spending how much for Adobe? Jobs is a pain in the ass, particularly when he gets distracted by consumer gear such as phones and mpeg players, but I've never heard him successfully characterized as actually being stupid with regard to the computer business.
In the end, if you lift up the rock the prepress people live under, you're going to find a lot of dead and dying critters. Print just isn't that big a deal any more other than to the shrinking demographic who are invested in it for whatever reason.
Web graphics, animation, video, photography - Apple's already prodding these markets. Do they really need Adobe? I can't see that they do.
In my opinion, it is a problem of the target audience. Shows that appeal broadly to the lower half of the Gaussian (reality TV, Flava uv Luv, Faux News, etc.) aren't going to hook the upper half. Likewise, the cheap gimmicks used in easy advertising aren't going to motivate the upper half to buy much of anything - most of us just snicker at the commercials, if we watch them at all.
This leads to a problem where the advertising can pay for the shows if the shows bring in people who can be suckered by the ads; and that in turn earns us garbage television and causes the occasional great show that pokes its head up above the water to have corporate reach over and push it right back under. They knew that show was popular with a significantly upscale audience, but they also knew that those people weren't supporting their advertisers.
The only shows that make it that will have any appeal at all to the upper half will also have significant elements of dumbshittery to them so as to drag Joe Sixpack off the tailgate of his pickup long enough to watch. Hence the mixed bag that the Treks represent, the awesome badness of Dr Who and the Torchwood spinoff mixed with just-happen-to-be interesting ideas, and the dreary soap-opera fuckarosis of the current edition of Battlestar.
Firefly, which I would rank as the best television series ever made by a huge margin, even went out of its way to include low-end social elements such as the cowboy ethos, highly imperfect and easily understandable characters (Jane, for instance) and a down-to-the-metal bucket of bolts kind of flying jalopy your average hick could understand and maintain (Kylie.) The beauty of those inclusions was that they actually fit in the universe painted for us; the tragedy was that the show just wasn't dumb enough. In fact, it wasn't dumb at all. And that, my slashy friends, means cancellation.
So. What's Britney up to today? More collagen for her lips? Still being held at arm's length from her kids? Any more video of her trying to dance without any practice or coaching? Fascinating stuff. Just... fascinating. Cough. I think I'll fool with Guitar Hero III instead of watching the tube tonight. Again.
10 nS jitter, Jeff, from the paper you cited. Likewise, read up as to why they used a 6 MHz field. 120 Hz fields are irrelevant. They even explain why. Otherwise, have a nice day. Have to move on now.
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I'm not going to discuss your superstitions with you. It just encourages them to spread.
Thank you. I consider your comment considerably more worthwhile than a mod point, frankly.
Privacy is entirely separate from locks.
Privacy is erected by the mutual knowledge of a boundary. That's all it takes to create it. You can violate it just as easily; if you're properly socialized, you won't, though. Society is rife with such boundaries.
What a lock, or bars, or encryption, or a threatening sign represents is hardening of a boundary. This doesn't make it any more or less of a boundary in terms of privacy, it just attempts to make it slightly more difficult for the poorly socialized - those who will not respect the boundaries the rest of us will - to cross. Doesn't always work, either.
There's an old saying, "locks are for honest people" that pays homage to the idea that a lock isn't by any means sufficient to secure a boundary. This is a clear warning that if you indeed wish to maintain your privacy, your family's private isolation from people who would not respect their health, safety, domicile, possessions - you had best be prepared to implement safeguards a great deal more potent than a lock.
That is why the constitution's 2nd amendment exists; in the case where the government fails to obey the boundaries laid out on paper in the constitution itself and refuses to change its ways, the idea is that the citizens won't just have more copies of the constitution to wave around - they'll have guns. The security of the free state, the entire collection of individuals, depends upon the government behaving properly. The state is all the people. The government is just some of the people. For the same reason that the security of the individual depends upon people not invading their persons, houses, papers, and effects, the security of the state as a whole depends on the government not doing it, either. There are boundaries; when they are crossed, there must be remedies.
Thank you.
Often, I'd rather have an actual *comment* than a rating; witness the fact that the post has already received an "overrated" mod. Doesn't do to get too excited about slash moderation, at least until, or unless, they take the broken part (the anonymous part) away. When people are accountable, they're a lot less likely to act stupidly.
Yes... in the eye.
Yes? Then how do you explain that the constitution explicitly says you are to be secure in your papers? Do you somehow think this means that the content of the papers is not covered, but the paper itself is to be secure from... what, fire? Mold? Confiscation by a paper envelope manufacturer? It is very clear that even if it is easy to do, the government may not search your communications. The generalization to telephone communications is both natural and appropriate, as is the generalization to electronic communications. Email isn't very useful any longer due to the pathological neglect of the government, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be covered by the same blanket as your physical mail and your other papers are, regardless if the "paper' is vellum, papyrus, pressed wood pulp, stone tablets, or packets. Look here: The only thing that makes "papers" valuable, gives them a need to be secure, is what is on them. Your thoughts, ideas, messages, financial state, etc. We're not talking about unused Kleenex here. We're talking about what is on the paper when we say papers, not just the paper itself.
Easy does not mean OK. Until any free person understands that, they're literally dangerous to this society.
Constitutional limits were placed on government because it was the authors experience that governments without limits had a dependable history of abusing the citizens. These limits do indeed make it more difficult for the government to do the legitimate jobs that are assigned to it; this was known right up front. If course it'd be easier to apprehend criminals if we knew everything about everybody. But that also opens the door to other problems, and the authors of the constitution took care to explicitly prevent this. Or so they thought. They didn't anticipate the legal system as it stands today, I think that's safe to say. Nor the arguments put forth by those who think it is the government's job to protect/forbid them from everything ranging from failure to use a seatbelt to enemies that are not even known to specifically exist, no matter what the cost might be in liberty.
Considerably more germane to how the US is supposed to work than a religious quote, the constitution has this to say:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Notice how a warrant has to be issued describing the "place" to be searched. The beginning of the amendment specifies "houses", but the rest is more general - the implication is that your shed, your place of business, someone else's coffee kiosk or bench or "mailbox of letters" or "container of packets", all are protected against unreasonable search. What is unreasonable in this context? It's right there, just read it: "right of the people to be secure" - that's unreasonable to violate. If you're not secure, you've been violated unless (a) they have probable cause and (b) they have a warrant and that warrant is supported by oath or affirmation.
With regard to communication modalities, at the time, what they had for remote communications was basically paper. Please note the explicit constitutional reference to the security of papers. You could write something down and send it elsewhere. This is where the idea that your mail should be secure comes from. Well, today, we have other mechanisms. Do you think that in ANY rational world, if the authors of the first amendment knew that you could send messages over wires or through the air, that they would have said, "Oh, well, in that case, you have no right to be secure? You can't base such an argument on how "easy" it is to read such communications, because there's nothing as easy to read as the mail is.
Those authors weren't trying to enumerate the "only" places you were to be secure, they were trying to say you should be secure PERIOD unless... oath, probable cause, warrant. I read the "persons, houses, papers and effects" as a general set of guidelines that is broadly inclusive; that reading is particularly supported by "effects", because that word is about as non-explicit as you can get in the language of the day.
Privacy is the social boundary that the citizens agree shall not be crossed. Closed doors shall be knocked upon; locked or not. Skirts shall not be looked up, short or long. Envelopes shall not be opened, unless addressed to you. Diaries shall not be read except by explicit permission from the author. These things are all important cornerstones of how society works. Not a one of them carries the addendum "unless it is easy" because it is obvious to each and every one of us that the existence of such boundaries is what makes life as an individual reasonable.
To the extent that the government argues that "because it can", it should be allowed to, we are faced with an intrusion that is both antisocial and constitutionally wrongheaded, as well as, I would argue, constitutionally anticipated and explicitly forbidden.
No, it really isn't. There's this marvelous technology, instantiated in these crazy devices we call "fuses", see...
Seriously, all you have to do is fuse the array internally on a per-block basis, and any shorted module will blow the fuse(s) to its neighbors, and that's the end of it. No explosion. No nothing. Just pffft and some new fuses (which might take a service call, but heck, you just ran into someone else, that's the least of your problems.)
One of the many benefits of capacitor systems is that you can arrange them many ways for many varied benefits. Paralleled caps simply add, so there's no reason not to break a high energy system up into blocks, and many reasons to do so. Not the least of which is the above issue, but it also makes replacement and service less expensive, less complicated, and allows use of smaller, easier to manufacture parts. And of course it allows various kinds of charging models.
I'm inclined to trust the engineers. If I can think of it (and I am an engineer, but not that kind) then they've probably though of it a hundred times over. The main issue here is energy per unit volume, and to a lesser extent, per unit weight. When and if those issues are really solved, we're golden.
Sad to say, I can read Baudot by eye from paper tape. I can spot shifts in an instant. I can read ASCII too. And 8080, 6800, and 6809 hexadecimal binary representation. Sigh. It's been a long revolution for me.
Friend of mine used to whistle into his microphone (we're amateur radio operators, "hams") and make a baudot demodulator spit out a continuous stream of RY's. Freak. :-)
I still have a couple SWTPC KC tape controllers, they both still work - I had kind of a old computer fest here a few years back, wrote 6809, z80 and 6800 emulations, gathered up all my old software and so forth. Was interesting. I was able to recover every tape I'd made; I thought the oxide would fall off, but no, they played back fine. I even read back a paper tape of BASIC; now that was a bit of a flashback. I keep the paper tape in a sealed can. It's some kind of oiled paper, holding up very well indeed.
Coming from you, with your boatload of misconceptions and bewilderment, that is actually quite funny. Thanks. You keep it up. One day that subscription to popular science will pay off for you.
Foveon implements multiple sensors, period, and using them for HDR is simply a matter of how they do dynamic range. Modern sensors are hitting 12...14 bits already; your eye is lucky to do eight with the iris at any one specific dilation. Most people are between 7 and 8 bits. Add your iris in, and you have a whole lot more, but that's not how we look at images.
As to whether they'll actually do HDR as a mode, I suspect they will. It is becoming surprisingly popular, considering how weird it makes images look.
I am interested, as a matter of fact. Have any model numbers?
Yes, Wayne Green. Kilobaud published my first technical article. Long time ago. 1977, I think. Thereabouts.
Well, just ask yourself: How much oil is there in Burma? And the answer is: Oil Production: 9500 Barrels Per Day (bbl/day) Oil Consumption: 20460 Barrels Per Day. Therefore, the monks die. But trust me, we are going to save Iraq. Yessir. We're gonna save it if it kills every last one of those locals, because they need to be saved. Might kill a few thousand of our soldiers, too, but there's no oil at their houses either, or they wouldn't be soldiers, so never mind all that.
I do. It's called a "hard drive" plus "backups", and said technology lets me keep my images around for display and printing on any hardware that comes along, hardware that will no doubt far exceed anything these kiosks you refer to can do today. In the meantime, LCD photo frames are fun, as is emailing images to the family. And of course, if we want prints, we can dump beautiful ones out in seconds using a photo printer that sits right here near the desk. Not that prints are desired very often.
Too late. It's already happened. Same location on chip, so the same sensor size, essentially three sensors at three different depths. Sigma SD14, for instance. Price is right in the prosumer zone.
I still have both the 320x240 and 640x480 Casio cameras; in fact, I have all my digital cameras. Must be twelve... maybe as many as fifteen of them. This is an area where up until recently, resale value just can't compete with technology. So everything got shelved and basically forgotten. Currently, I have a Canon EOS 40D, and that baby is fun !
Probably going to be stuck with Canon for a while too, lenses make the investment fairly specific. I just bought my first cadioptric lens, basically a reflector telescope (500 mm, fixed 1/f8) which also works for close focus macros. I have a 2x (to 1000 mm) converter for it, too. I bought it after a friend let me borrow his 600 mm Sigma cadioptric and I was able to easily, nay, trivially, shoot this picture of the moon. Haven't tried my new one on that yet, it's solid overcast here. Sigh.
Pournelle was definitely one of the specific reasons I let my subscription to Byte run out. I had never read so much wrongheaded nonsense in one place until I encountered his column. Eventually I began to feel that any organization that paid that man for his opinions (as opposed to his fiction, which I generally like, especially if Niven is around to make it *really* good) wasn't going to get any more of my money.
At least that crazy wacko in Kilobaud was fun to read. It was like a print version of Art Bell. Pornelle was just... dreary.
I'll look into it, thanks. Hadn't heard of it previously.
Damn rain. Going to pull the "getting technical" card on me, eh? Well, I raise you a 205" 1080p projection system for gaming, DVD, Blueray and HD-DVD. No tube involved (well... there's the projection lamp, I suppose. Umph.) We only watch broadcast (satellite) TV in the bathtub, there's a good sized Toshiba HD tube screen in there, along with a Dish DVR which saves our TV fare, such as it is, for those moments when we can slide under the water at a moment's warning. So as it turns out, the consoles aren't plugged into "the tube."
I'm in a rural town in Montana. Both the local paper and the local radio station have extensive web sites. As well as the local government and any number of local businesses, plus there is a general town commercial site.
And of course, meth busts aren't for people who can read anyway; the drug war is free job security for politicians courtesy of those voters who don't have the sense to pour piss out of a boot, much less read, along with the various other wars against our right to make personal choices.
I don't think your local bond election is very likely to involve a slew of issues that would get you into an argument at your local print shop about the UCR level, either. "Say, Mac, this pile of sewer pipes don't really 'pop', off da page, y'know?" Still, you're looking at opportunities there. Pictures work with these people. Especially if they're taken with the proper slant. The thing is, there's no pressing need for these pictures to be in print; plus the whole process or printing limited time value material is environmentally unsound.
No, it really doesn't. People just need to know to look. Around here, we know to look. We even know where to look. It isn't that hard to get across. The local radio station, billboards, mentions from the church pulpit or at the local Elks club... no more challenging than any other job of local marketing. Sounds to me like your town is a wide-open business opportunity. There are still quite a few areas ripe for bringing into the modern world. I didn't say print was dead, remember. I said it was declining.
I'm sorry, you misread what I wrote. I said that a lot of our print people no longer did print, and that relatively fewer people contact us about print matters. That's something else entirely.
I would agree whole-heartedly with this. Email as a general tool is on its last legs. We use direct delivery from the webserver's contact forms to otherwise unconnected email boxes; we get exactly 0% spam. Sending email is something else entirely. Well, something will come along to replace this, too, eventually. The whole "we trust each other vibe" that a lot of the net started with wasn't a very good idea, sad to say.
The thing is, print and prepress are steeply declining. Magazines are getting thinner, readership is dropping for everything from porn to popular science; why pay for month old news and views when you can get it tonight, for free, up to the second, on the web?
We spent literally years building extensive prepress into our products until we had a more flexible and more powerful model than Photoshop had, something able to flex further and simply get a better print result by virtue of better control over the various print issues like allowing a mix of UCR and GCR approaches, more flexible and easier to use color separation models; and it used to be that a lot of our customers were very into getting that last bit of quality through the printshop and onto the paper.
No longer. Our userbase continues to increase, but a goodly number of our old print customers have moved on to web-centric undertakings and we hear from relatively fewer new print people. I can't say I'm disappointed, a prepress person tends to need a lot more care and support than a web designer does, all other things being equal.
The problem that a company like Adobe faces is that very little of what Photoshop does is all that hard to find in less expensive software. Apple knows this; buying Adobe would simply be buying a name, because the underlying technology is no mystery to anyone. Apple's already facing Adobe directly with the Aperture / Lightroom product pair - if Apple wants an imaging product, there are comparably powerful engines out there already, or they could devote a couple of savvy imaging people and a GUI person to the project and they'd have something significant in a year or so. As opposed to spending how much for Adobe? Jobs is a pain in the ass, particularly when he gets distracted by consumer gear such as phones and mpeg players, but I've never heard him successfully characterized as actually being stupid with regard to the computer business.
In the end, if you lift up the rock the prepress people live under, you're going to find a lot of dead and dying critters. Print just isn't that big a deal any more other than to the shrinking demographic who are invested in it for whatever reason.
Web graphics, animation, video, photography - Apple's already prodding these markets. Do they really need Adobe? I can't see that they do.
In my opinion, it is a problem of the target audience. Shows that appeal broadly to the lower half of the Gaussian (reality TV, Flava uv Luv, Faux News, etc.) aren't going to hook the upper half. Likewise, the cheap gimmicks used in easy advertising aren't going to motivate the upper half to buy much of anything - most of us just snicker at the commercials, if we watch them at all.
This leads to a problem where the advertising can pay for the shows if the shows bring in people who can be suckered by the ads; and that in turn earns us garbage television and causes the occasional great show that pokes its head up above the water to have corporate reach over and push it right back under. They knew that show was popular with a significantly upscale audience, but they also knew that those people weren't supporting their advertisers.
The only shows that make it that will have any appeal at all to the upper half will also have significant elements of dumbshittery to them so as to drag Joe Sixpack off the tailgate of his pickup long enough to watch. Hence the mixed bag that the Treks represent, the awesome badness of Dr Who and the Torchwood spinoff mixed with just-happen-to-be interesting ideas, and the dreary soap-opera fuckarosis of the current edition of Battlestar.
Firefly, which I would rank as the best television series ever made by a huge margin, even went out of its way to include low-end social elements such as the cowboy ethos, highly imperfect and easily understandable characters (Jane, for instance) and a down-to-the-metal bucket of bolts kind of flying jalopy your average hick could understand and maintain (Kylie.) The beauty of those inclusions was that they actually fit in the universe painted for us; the tragedy was that the show just wasn't dumb enough. In fact, it wasn't dumb at all. And that, my slashy friends, means cancellation.
So. What's Britney up to today? More collagen for her lips? Still being held at arm's length from her kids? Any more video of her trying to dance without any practice or coaching? Fascinating stuff. Just... fascinating. Cough. I think I'll fool with Guitar Hero III instead of watching the tube tonight. Again.
10 nS jitter, Jeff, from the paper you cited. Likewise, read up as to why they used a 6 MHz field. 120 Hz fields are irrelevant. They even explain why. Otherwise, have a nice day. Have to move on now.