640x480 is about half a megapixel. Based on the post I thought the intent was to capture ultra high res video.
Soft backgrounds are tough. The real issue is apeture size. The smaller the size the deeper the depth of field. I shot a hidef film and getting a soft background was tough. You needed a ton of light and even then it wasn't that soft. In the film world 8mm tends to have a lot of range due to the small apeture. Forced perspective is easy since there's a deep focas. Try the same shot with Vistavison. It's nearly impossible with Vistavision to do forced perspective because the focas is so shallow. It's why it was used for so many westerns and outdoor films. Works great with a ton of light and the lens at infinity. It's like a pin hole camera. If you want to see CU stick a tiny hole in a piece of tin foil. Even with bad eye sight fine print looks sharp. Now punch it out until it's the size of a pencil, no effect. Kind of the same with lens. It's the optics that give you the shallow focas. With a bigger CCD you get a wider open lens to cover the chip. It's good and bad but it mimics 35mm far better and gives you a similar look and feel to the way it focases.
You NEED a movie mode in this camera. Decent movie mode alone would make it a cult gadget because with such a large sensor it would beat the crap out of camcorders three times the price (which is why I guess movie mode was not included in R1 - Sony makes camcorders too).
I think you'd find it'd add a zero or two to the price tag. The problem isn't the CCD chip it's buffering and storing 30fps video. Most still cameras take a second or two to store a single high res frame. They can do video because of the radically lower resolution. It'd take a pretty beefy storage system to handle even 15fps at full res. Pro video cameras at nearly that res go for better than a hundred grand. Notice I said nearly that res because they aren't quite. It'd be fun to have even if it did only 15 seconds of video but I think we are about five years away from anything that compact handling 6 megapixel video.
You talked me into it, I'm going. Too cool buying fresh roasted beans from road side vendors. Worth paying the duty and shipping a selection back. Shouldn't be an issue like produce. Might get a caffine jacked tarantula hiding in the bags though.
They seem to indicate it's a mystery why some would prefer SLR and it was more nostalgia than practical need. Well take it from a pro that has had to use compact digital cameras. It's nearly impossible to focas most of them properly. Most people don't care because they let the auto focas do it for them. The screens on the prosumer non SLRs just aren't good enough to judge focas in a lot of situations especially low light. If the screen is good enough you might live without seeing through the lens but I'd definately want to try one and see the output before I bought one. I can get a true SLR for that price so for me I don't see the advantage and I think most pros will have the same opinion. It's really aimed at higher end consumer use. Basically consumers that want pro quality without having to deal with looking through a lens. I'd consider one for a back up pro camera, what I call crowd cams. Essentially at times you need to hold a camera over your head or at an odd angle. I could see the usefulness then, I've got a prosumer camera for that use myself.
Yeah you hit the nail on the head. Coffee in the US is all blends of cheap beans. The very best coffee is going to be single source. Coffee is very sensitive to moisure availible so it can vary even within a plantain given soil conditions. Envious you got the good stuff. I'd love to check out local coffees in central and south america. Blue Mountain is supposed to be the best but it's expensive and hard to come by. Most of what is sold as Blue Mountain is either not the real thing or a blend.
I actually talked some one at Starbucks into making a proper cappuccino a couple of times but it's about as much fun as wrestling a greased alligator. The real one that annoys me is they refuse to use steamed milk in a cappuccino. They claim the only difference between a cappuccino and latte is the foam. The quantity of milk is the other issue. I've tried to tell them it's expresso with a shot of steamed milk and foam not milk with a little coffee for color and a shot of foam. Very few of them are real coffee drinkers and they just know what corporate tells them. The Crapuccinos are another thing. Guys it's a coffee milkshake, deal with it.
Haven't swam that far yet but I did spend a fair amount of time in New Zealand and they have decent coffee as well. American coffee is like american beer, watered down swill. In France they actually water down french coffee and call it american coffee. Pretty funny and I think it's meant to be insulting. I even had some russian coffee that was better than american and it had an edge like battery acid.
Definately plan to spend some time in Australia. I just want to be able to hang out for a few months and it's hard to find the time.
Sad to see Starbucks spreading to lands with decent coffee. Oddly enough France has kind of tolerated MacDonalds but they are highly offended by Starbucks. They're pretty fussy about bread, wine and coffee.
FYI on Mercury vapor. Generally the vapor comes from a tiny amount of mercury in the bulb that generates the vapor when heated. Florescent lights work in the same manner so if your scared of these tiny bulbs you should be in bind terror of the big tubes. Older bulbs you could actually see a big blob of mercury laying in the tube. The real danger comes if the contents are heated. That's why in the 1800s photographers got mercury poisoning because they heated mercury and waved the glass pane over it to develope the picture. Not real safe. I worked in a shop once that a carpenter built a curing oven and then installed florescent lights. I had to explain the problem and told him to replace them with incandescent bulbs. Mercury is safe enough so long as it's kept cool and you don't come in contact with it. That said I don't like working around the stuff and won't. If any gets spilled everytime the room gets hot you're breathing vapor. The only safe way of handling it is in a closed environment with proper scrubbers for the air.
Got to hit Europe for coffee. Every country I've been in had better coffee than here. Even the supposed good coffee here doesn't measure up. If you're hard core France is the place. Spain was milder but good. Starbucks drives me nuts. You can order the most elaborate drink combination known to man and yet they can't manage a cappuccino to save their lives. I personally love iced cappuccino but the last place I got a properly made one was of all places a high end coffee shop at the Burbank airport. Almost worth flying in just for the coffee. Really got to get a new machine. The Krups ones just don't have enough steam for proper foam. Just hate to dump $400 to $600 for a real machine. Add a grand or more for a resturant model. Also in Europe they tend to use sterile milk which is a little more like condensed milk. It actually adds a different flavor and works better with stronger coffee.
The original contest was to write a virus to infect windows messenger but they decided the contest should be more challenging. The new contest is to write Linux viruses. He figured it'd killed two birds with one stone.
In truth it's just mimicing zero gee. It's really freefall inside an airplane when you get right down to it. The major differences between it and sky diving are no chutes, no rushing air and you have walls around you to push off from. Oh you you don't have that sudden decelloration when you hit the ground. The nausea is worse than zero gees because it's the negative gees you get from falling. Seems like a pointless novelty but so is Reality TV.
Actually not. It was a blanket replacement for the X rating. The real purpose wasn't just sexual content but all inappropriate content without the X stigma, now we have the NC-17 stigma. It's possible to get an NC-17 for no sexual content or even language, violence and gore is enough. The irony is that's where the argument first got hot. George Romero was known for not submitting his films for rating because several of the Dead films would have gotten X ratings inspite of lacking any real sexual content, if seeing a naked zombie turns you on you've got issues. When the standard was established it also covered strong sexual content in mainstream films. Ironically it wound up once again lumping violence with sex. The real issue then becomes that most people see the two subjects differently. Some have no problem with sex are offended with extreme violence while other others are offended by sex on screen. The ratings often spell out which it is but most have a knee jerk reaction to seeing an NC-17 and assume it's for sexual content. It was kind of a botched revision that ignored the real world. They really need to throw in the towel and create a split rating for violence and sexual content. Seems obvious enough list extreme sexual content as "S" and extreme violent content as "V" and films with both "SV" or "VS". There's still the watermark of what constitutes each rating. Everyone has their standards. Personally I'd like "R" to mean religious content but that's just me.
Where do I sign up for the $1 billion government grant to study this new "ocean"? Since it's going to take a while, I should build a nice palace -- uh, research station -- to observe this natural event.
The issue I have is with intolerance. The recent Christian movement doesn't even tolerate other Christian sects. Personally I'm a Buddist and the core beliefs are that life and religion is an individual journey and you shouldn't force your beliefs on anyone else. If all religions followed this simple doctrine an incredible amount of violence and death could have been avoided over the centuries. Most of the war going on today has roots in religious intolerance. I take exception to religious doctrine being taught in school including Buddism inspite of it being a more Philosophy than a religion. I believe in studying all religions and I make sure that my children are well versed in as many religions as possible including Hindu and Mosleum faiths. There's good in all religions and most share core beliefs. There's even a strong belief that Christ studied Buddism since much of what he taught was Buddist in nature. It's always a trick question what religion Christ was. It's obvious but most people have trouble getting past prejudice to realize he was a practising Jew right up until the day he died. Christianity came out of Judaism and the Mosleum faith came out of Christianity. It's why so many of the holly places are the same. The Old Testment is basically Judaic. It's amazing to me that none of them really get along. The mosleums and Jews even consider Christ a holy man, it's the divinity issue where they part company.
Public school should be about proven fact and science meets that standard. Religion doesn't require proof but that's what makes it subjective. Science should be the one thing they all can agree on. Saying that science is wrong and three to four thousand year old religous text is right does make us look ignorant and that's how much of the world has begun to view us. Jewish scholars have found much of the old testment is incorrect. The irony is they have accepted the science and have begun to view much of it as stories with a message where as Christians in this country are still holding that it is fact and children should be taught as much in public schools. Can you see the irony? Christians borrow part of their religion from Jews who later find it is a collection of stories and not fact, they accept it but the later religion chooses to hang on inspite of what the parent religion now believes to be true. Even the Catholic faith has accepted evolution. What people need to consider is it the Bible that makes you disbelieve in evolution or what the preacher on Sunday told you? The New Testment makes no mention of how creation occured. What's really ironic is most Bibles these days don't even include the Old Testment yet that seems to be the part where all the contention is, that's the PreChristian part to be more specific. If the world being 6 billion years old instead of six thousand years old shakes a person's faith I think they need to exaimine the strength of their faith and not simply try to silence those who don't share their beliefs, in this case most of humanity. Just an FYI, if you think the preacher on Sunday morning is telling you the whole truth double check what is said against the Bible. There's alot of grossly inaccurate information being thrown around if the point is literally interpretation. My favorites always revolve around Angels and Heaven. Most are taught Heaven is full of good people and they turn into Angels when they die. Not sure where they got that? It wasn't from the Bible. The only "person" that comes to mind currently in Heaven is Jacob, direct assention. Everyone else is waiting judgement. Also Angels predated men/humans. They were never people but another race and were called "The Sons Of God". In fact there's no mention of female angels anywhere in the Bible. Sadly a lot of the intent has been lost. Praying to get things and passing judgement on others aways drives me nuts, they are blanantly unChristian. According to the Bible you are supposed to accept God's will and whatever happened to "Judge not lest yee be judged"? God is supposed to judge not man. I have no problem with re
Maybe Intel is just jealous because to hand-crank power a Pentium 4 laptop would take you a few hours.
I just realized ME must have been designed to work with a handcrank. It all finally makes sense. Maybe for once Gates was being farsighted. Just wait, they'll come out with a handcrankable version of XP using the ME core.
Columbus spent a lot of money trying to find a new trade route to the far east and discovered something far more important, America. The sensible thing might have been to stay home but in the end would have cost Spain countless millions in lost revenue from the find. Bringing back Moon rocks proved that the Moon is rich in Helium 3 that can make large scale fusion possible. With out vast amounts of electricity much of the world would have to go back to candles for light and shadow puppets for entertainment. The technology we have wouldn't exist without pushing the practical limits. Remember a little over a hundred years ago most people were farmers and they plowed with horses. It was just over a hundred years ago that powered flight happened and around a hundred years ago that electricity started to be a common thing in cities, a hundred and fifty years ago it was still largely a curiosity. If science keeps pushing forward what happens in the next hundred years? There was less than seventy years between the first powered flight and landing on the moon. There's beating your dinner over the head with a rock or watching your plasma TV, as a previous poster mentioned, and eating delivered pizza. Since it's impossible to know where the next big break through is coming from it's impossible to pick and choose. The safe bet is to choose knowledge over ignorance. You might be able to live without the TV but remember life span used to average 35 years. I'm nearly 45 and by the standards of a few hundred years ago would be an old man. As it is I'm middle aged and could live past a hundred. Not all science is a waste of money, at times the benefits aren't obvious but they are there.
I quit Disney years ago and had the opposite thing happen. They were firing a lot of people around the time and everyone that got fired or layed off were escorted to their work area to collect their things then walked out by a guard. I quit for personal reasons. I finished out my last week with no problems, collected my things and left. In my case they apparently felt I wanted to leave so there wouldn't be any reprisals where as the people fired might steal or damage company property to get revenge for the sudden dismissal. Pretty normal for a corporation but it was just interesting that some one that quit was treated so differently. I've had the same experience as the poster with other companies though. Once you've quit most don't want you around and will insist you leave that day.
Rodent brains may seem small, but think of where we can go if we can ramp this technology... One day we may have humans flying planes!
It'll never happen. If people were meant to fly they would have wings. A rat however when propelled with sufficent force are quite capible of flight. If you load one into a cannon with enough powder they can even hit supersonic speeds. They aren't very good at landings so they rarely fly on their own. A block of cheese stuffed down a cannon barrel can encourage the little rascals to take flight. Just don't point the cannon towards a brick wall, I'll never make that mistake twice.
The issue isn't about printing becoming obsolete but writing as a profession. At first it was just E-Books or digitized material that was at risk but now they are starting to scan in printed books and making them availible. How many professional writers will there be if they can no longer sell their work? The cost of printing and distributing written material in some ways has protected the profession but digitized material can be reproduced at little or no cost so it can spread through the internet like a virus. If traditional publishing ceases to exist it won't be a triumph for the internet it'll be a loss for humanity because many talented writers will have to find other professions. Everyone talks about it being a benefit to writers but so far most methods of distribution through the web have failed or involve giving away the writers work. Big business will always survive what is at risk or the livelihoods of artists and creative people. The more it cuts into corporate profits the more they'll turn the screws on the artists and pay less and less for their. You have to remember for every successful writer there's a thousand starving ones. Few get rich and even now most can't make a decent living at it.
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Wasn't there a post about that? I seemed to remember it involved canibalizing a tin foil hat as well.
Soft backgrounds are tough. The real issue is apeture size. The smaller the size the deeper the depth of field. I shot a hidef film and getting a soft background was tough. You needed a ton of light and even then it wasn't that soft. In the film world 8mm tends to have a lot of range due to the small apeture. Forced perspective is easy since there's a deep focas. Try the same shot with Vistavison. It's nearly impossible with Vistavision to do forced perspective because the focas is so shallow. It's why it was used for so many westerns and outdoor films. Works great with a ton of light and the lens at infinity. It's like a pin hole camera. If you want to see CU stick a tiny hole in a piece of tin foil. Even with bad eye sight fine print looks sharp. Now punch it out until it's the size of a pencil, no effect. Kind of the same with lens. It's the optics that give you the shallow focas. With a bigger CCD you get a wider open lens to cover the chip. It's good and bad but it mimics 35mm far better and gives you a similar look and feel to the way it focases.
I think you'd find it'd add a zero or two to the price tag. The problem isn't the CCD chip it's buffering and storing 30fps video. Most still cameras take a second or two to store a single high res frame. They can do video because of the radically lower resolution. It'd take a pretty beefy storage system to handle even 15fps at full res. Pro video cameras at nearly that res go for better than a hundred grand. Notice I said nearly that res because they aren't quite. It'd be fun to have even if it did only 15 seconds of video but I think we are about five years away from anything that compact handling 6 megapixel video.
You talked me into it, I'm going. Too cool buying fresh roasted beans from road side vendors. Worth paying the duty and shipping a selection back. Shouldn't be an issue like produce. Might get a caffine jacked tarantula hiding in the bags though.
They seem to indicate it's a mystery why some would prefer SLR and it was more nostalgia than practical need. Well take it from a pro that has had to use compact digital cameras. It's nearly impossible to focas most of them properly. Most people don't care because they let the auto focas do it for them. The screens on the prosumer non SLRs just aren't good enough to judge focas in a lot of situations especially low light. If the screen is good enough you might live without seeing through the lens but I'd definately want to try one and see the output before I bought one. I can get a true SLR for that price so for me I don't see the advantage and I think most pros will have the same opinion. It's really aimed at higher end consumer use. Basically consumers that want pro quality without having to deal with looking through a lens. I'd consider one for a back up pro camera, what I call crowd cams. Essentially at times you need to hold a camera over your head or at an odd angle. I could see the usefulness then, I've got a prosumer camera for that use myself.
Yeah you hit the nail on the head. Coffee in the US is all blends of cheap beans. The very best coffee is going to be single source. Coffee is very sensitive to moisure availible so it can vary even within a plantain given soil conditions. Envious you got the good stuff. I'd love to check out local coffees in central and south america. Blue Mountain is supposed to be the best but it's expensive and hard to come by. Most of what is sold as Blue Mountain is either not the real thing or a blend.
I actually talked some one at Starbucks into making a proper cappuccino a couple of times but it's about as much fun as wrestling a greased alligator. The real one that annoys me is they refuse to use steamed milk in a cappuccino. They claim the only difference between a cappuccino and latte is the foam. The quantity of milk is the other issue. I've tried to tell them it's expresso with a shot of steamed milk and foam not milk with a little coffee for color and a shot of foam. Very few of them are real coffee drinkers and they just know what corporate tells them. The Crapuccinos are another thing. Guys it's a coffee milkshake, deal with it.
Definately plan to spend some time in Australia. I just want to be able to hang out for a few months and it's hard to find the time.
Sad to see Starbucks spreading to lands with decent coffee. Oddly enough France has kind of tolerated MacDonalds but they are highly offended by Starbucks. They're pretty fussy about bread, wine and coffee.
FYI on Mercury vapor. Generally the vapor comes from a tiny amount of mercury in the bulb that generates the vapor when heated. Florescent lights work in the same manner so if your scared of these tiny bulbs you should be in bind terror of the big tubes. Older bulbs you could actually see a big blob of mercury laying in the tube. The real danger comes if the contents are heated. That's why in the 1800s photographers got mercury poisoning because they heated mercury and waved the glass pane over it to develope the picture. Not real safe. I worked in a shop once that a carpenter built a curing oven and then installed florescent lights. I had to explain the problem and told him to replace them with incandescent bulbs. Mercury is safe enough so long as it's kept cool and you don't come in contact with it. That said I don't like working around the stuff and won't. If any gets spilled everytime the room gets hot you're breathing vapor. The only safe way of handling it is in a closed environment with proper scrubbers for the air.
Got to hit Europe for coffee. Every country I've been in had better coffee than here. Even the supposed good coffee here doesn't measure up. If you're hard core France is the place. Spain was milder but good. Starbucks drives me nuts. You can order the most elaborate drink combination known to man and yet they can't manage a cappuccino to save their lives. I personally love iced cappuccino but the last place I got a properly made one was of all places a high end coffee shop at the Burbank airport. Almost worth flying in just for the coffee. Really got to get a new machine. The Krups ones just don't have enough steam for proper foam. Just hate to dump $400 to $600 for a real machine. Add a grand or more for a resturant model. Also in Europe they tend to use sterile milk which is a little more like condensed milk. It actually adds a different flavor and works better with stronger coffee.
The original contest was to write a virus to infect windows messenger but they decided the contest should be more challenging. The new contest is to write Linux viruses. He figured it'd killed two birds with one stone.
Damn, that explains why the mouse trap looks like a pretzel. Time to break out the bear traps and a wheel of cheese.
In truth it's just mimicing zero gee. It's really freefall inside an airplane when you get right down to it. The major differences between it and sky diving are no chutes, no rushing air and you have walls around you to push off from. Oh you you don't have that sudden decelloration when you hit the ground. The nausea is worse than zero gees because it's the negative gees you get from falling. Seems like a pointless novelty but so is Reality TV.
Actually not. It was a blanket replacement for the X rating. The real purpose wasn't just sexual content but all inappropriate content without the X stigma, now we have the NC-17 stigma. It's possible to get an NC-17 for no sexual content or even language, violence and gore is enough. The irony is that's where the argument first got hot. George Romero was known for not submitting his films for rating because several of the Dead films would have gotten X ratings inspite of lacking any real sexual content, if seeing a naked zombie turns you on you've got issues. When the standard was established it also covered strong sexual content in mainstream films. Ironically it wound up once again lumping violence with sex. The real issue then becomes that most people see the two subjects differently. Some have no problem with sex are offended with extreme violence while other others are offended by sex on screen. The ratings often spell out which it is but most have a knee jerk reaction to seeing an NC-17 and assume it's for sexual content. It was kind of a botched revision that ignored the real world. They really need to throw in the towel and create a split rating for violence and sexual content. Seems obvious enough list extreme sexual content as "S" and extreme violent content as "V" and films with both "SV" or "VS". There's still the watermark of what constitutes each rating. Everyone has their standards. Personally I'd like "R" to mean religious content but that's just me.
Step one, change your name to Haliburton.
Step two, massive profits.
Public school should be about proven fact and science meets that standard. Religion doesn't require proof but that's what makes it subjective. Science should be the one thing they all can agree on. Saying that science is wrong and three to four thousand year old religous text is right does make us look ignorant and that's how much of the world has begun to view us. Jewish scholars have found much of the old testment is incorrect. The irony is they have accepted the science and have begun to view much of it as stories with a message where as Christians in this country are still holding that it is fact and children should be taught as much in public schools. Can you see the irony? Christians borrow part of their religion from Jews who later find it is a collection of stories and not fact, they accept it but the later religion chooses to hang on inspite of what the parent religion now believes to be true. Even the Catholic faith has accepted evolution. What people need to consider is it the Bible that makes you disbelieve in evolution or what the preacher on Sunday told you? The New Testment makes no mention of how creation occured. What's really ironic is most Bibles these days don't even include the Old Testment yet that seems to be the part where all the contention is, that's the PreChristian part to be more specific. If the world being 6 billion years old instead of six thousand years old shakes a person's faith I think they need to exaimine the strength of their faith and not simply try to silence those who don't share their beliefs, in this case most of humanity. Just an FYI, if you think the preacher on Sunday morning is telling you the whole truth double check what is said against the Bible. There's alot of grossly inaccurate information being thrown around if the point is literally interpretation. My favorites always revolve around Angels and Heaven. Most are taught Heaven is full of good people and they turn into Angels when they die. Not sure where they got that? It wasn't from the Bible. The only "person" that comes to mind currently in Heaven is Jacob, direct assention. Everyone else is waiting judgement. Also Angels predated men/humans. They were never people but another race and were called "The Sons Of God". In fact there's no mention of female angels anywhere in the Bible. Sadly a lot of the intent has been lost. Praying to get things and passing judgement on others aways drives me nuts, they are blanantly unChristian. According to the Bible you are supposed to accept God's will and whatever happened to "Judge not lest yee be judged"? God is supposed to judge not man. I have no problem with re
Aren't they overlooking the lesbian gaming market?
I just realized ME must have been designed to work with a handcrank. It all finally makes sense. Maybe for once Gates was being farsighted. Just wait, they'll come out with a handcrankable version of XP using the ME core.
Yeah but the drive is paranoid and confused now. It keeps asking for privacy software.
Columbus spent a lot of money trying to find a new trade route to the far east and discovered something far more important, America. The sensible thing might have been to stay home but in the end would have cost Spain countless millions in lost revenue from the find. Bringing back Moon rocks proved that the Moon is rich in Helium 3 that can make large scale fusion possible. With out vast amounts of electricity much of the world would have to go back to candles for light and shadow puppets for entertainment. The technology we have wouldn't exist without pushing the practical limits. Remember a little over a hundred years ago most people were farmers and they plowed with horses. It was just over a hundred years ago that powered flight happened and around a hundred years ago that electricity started to be a common thing in cities, a hundred and fifty years ago it was still largely a curiosity. If science keeps pushing forward what happens in the next hundred years? There was less than seventy years between the first powered flight and landing on the moon. There's beating your dinner over the head with a rock or watching your plasma TV, as a previous poster mentioned, and eating delivered pizza. Since it's impossible to know where the next big break through is coming from it's impossible to pick and choose. The safe bet is to choose knowledge over ignorance. You might be able to live without the TV but remember life span used to average 35 years. I'm nearly 45 and by the standards of a few hundred years ago would be an old man. As it is I'm middle aged and could live past a hundred. Not all science is a waste of money, at times the benefits aren't obvious but they are there.
I quit Disney years ago and had the opposite thing happen. They were firing a lot of people around the time and everyone that got fired or layed off were escorted to their work area to collect their things then walked out by a guard. I quit for personal reasons. I finished out my last week with no problems, collected my things and left. In my case they apparently felt I wanted to leave so there wouldn't be any reprisals where as the people fired might steal or damage company property to get revenge for the sudden dismissal. Pretty normal for a corporation but it was just interesting that some one that quit was treated so differently. I've had the same experience as the poster with other companies though. Once you've quit most don't want you around and will insist you leave that day.
Gates is petty enough to pay it in pennies. He'd probably hire a team of people to unroll them all just to add insult to injury.
It's called the beer gene, I thought everyone knew about that one?
It'll never happen. If people were meant to fly they would have wings. A rat however when propelled with sufficent force are quite capible of flight. If you load one into a cannon with enough powder they can even hit supersonic speeds. They aren't very good at landings so they rarely fly on their own. A block of cheese stuffed down a cannon barrel can encourage the little rascals to take flight. Just don't point the cannon towards a brick wall, I'll never make that mistake twice.
The issue isn't about printing becoming obsolete but writing as a profession. At first it was just E-Books or digitized material that was at risk but now they are starting to scan in printed books and making them availible. How many professional writers will there be if they can no longer sell their work? The cost of printing and distributing written material in some ways has protected the profession but digitized material can be reproduced at little or no cost so it can spread through the internet like a virus. If traditional publishing ceases to exist it won't be a triumph for the internet it'll be a loss for humanity because many talented writers will have to find other professions. Everyone talks about it being a benefit to writers but so far most methods of distribution through the web have failed or involve giving away the writers work. Big business will always survive what is at risk or the livelihoods of artists and creative people. The more it cuts into corporate profits the more they'll turn the screws on the artists and pay less and less for their. You have to remember for every successful writer there's a thousand starving ones. Few get rich and even now most can't make a decent living at it.