At risk of invoking Godwin's law, China criticising the USA for censorship today would be like Nazi Germany criticizing the UK for fascism during WWII.
If and when the US has another natural disaster, I hope we can come somewhere close to what they are doing.
We won't - it will become a political tool rather than a humanitarian crisis. We (collective we) will blame the Army Corps of Engineers for building an inadequate levee, ignoring that they actually recommended an effective design but only got approval to build a superficial levee. Then, we will blame $CURRENT_ADMINISTRATION because obviously the $NATURAL_DISASTER was a government conspiracy designed to wipe out $UNDESIRABLE_ETHNIC_GROUP because $POLITICIAN hates $UNDESIRABLE_ETHNIC_GROUP. The fact that $GOVERNMENT_AGENCY is prevented by federal law from stepping in and $RESPONSIVE_ACTION until $LOCAL_OFFICIAL declares a state of emergency and requests assistance will go ignored by press and the people who hate $PRESIDENT and they'll get to spout their stupidity all over $NEWS_NETWORK_OF_CHOICE.
You'd like to believe natural disasters bring out the best in humanity, but really it comes down to culture. In our culture (or lack thereof) we tend to be petty and polarized and put a political spin on everything, and our press will sensationalize the stupidity because it is good for ratings.
Do something irresponsible (build a seaside city below sea level, build a nuclear reactor at sea level on the shore in an area known for getting hit with tsunami) and something is bound to go horribly wrong sooner or later.
The funny thing about the whole boycott thing is boycotting one day won't hurt sony in the slightest, just as boycotting Mobil for one day would not hurt Mobil at all. All you are doing is delaying your purchase for a day.
Want to hurt a publicly-traded company? Organize a large-scale boycott for a minimum of one quarter. THAT is how you can make Sony execs notice; when the quarterly results show a huge drop in revenue shareholders will be screaming for blood.
Otherwise, don't even bother. If you're going to buy a Sony LCD television, go ahead and buy it on 04/16 because if you delay it to 04/17 it makes no difference to Sony.
Go to a photo site and you'll see people get all riled up if you say anything against "their" brand of camera. Same goes for power tools - you'll see Ridgid and DeWalt fanboys.
So true - go to any Nikon forum and you'll see Canon fans posting crap, go to Canon forums and see Nikon fans posting crap - usually in the form of gross misinformation to "prove" their choice of camera is better, completely ignoring the fact that they're just tools and there is no one single BFH that works for all situations.
It seems every market has that kind of blind follower - be it cars (okay admittedly my username includes my favorite car, but I don't make excuses for GM. GM sucks and should have been allowed to fail, IMHO), computers (witness Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux crap here on a daily basis), phones (witness iPhone vs. Android crap here on a daily basis), sports (Sox suck! No, Yankees suck! No, you suck! No, you suck!), and so on. People like something and raise them to the level if idols and worship them for some reason. They forget sports is just entertainment, that technology is just tools, and cars are tools with an artistic shell.
I hate most Mercedes vehicles, but that doesn't mean I need to go trolling about how much greater the cars I like are better than Mercedes - because the cars I choose for my purposes would not fit the purposes or tastes of the next person. Likewise, in the past I have chosen vehicles I HATED because they were practical for my purpose and at the time 99% of my driving was for business, and no matter how you try, you simply can't haul a load of servers in a sportscar or even a sports sedan.
Irrational people will be irrational, douchebags will be douchebags, and rational people will be rational (although generally rational people may on occasion seek irrational enjoyment from mocking douchebags and trolls). Some people feel the irrational need to support the idea that the product/team/person/thing/place they like/bought/watch/live is best, and therefore everyone else makes the wrong decision because their choice sucks.
But, let me wrap this up by saying that Sony sucks - and I am not being irrational here.;)
I responded many years ago before the rootkit by not buying Sony products and by recommending Samsung, LG, or even Vizio screens for clients who need large wall-mounted screens in their offices, conference rooms, etc.
I started avoided Sony when I found their replacement parts costs to be obscene when I wanted to repair my DVP-S360 DVD player - I paid a premium for the Sony for the feature set (mainly the full-feature front-panel controls) and it turned out the entire run was bad and became known for failing just after warranty. I priced out replacement parts but by then competitors were offering DVD players that could play various mpeg4 videos and the part I needed cost more than competitor offerings, and I could even get a Sony DVD player for a few dollars more.
Another thing is in a lot of Sony products they use resistors in place of fuses, making troubleshooting more time consuming. Between that and cold solder joints in their televisions, it was obvious Sony decided to just start phoning it in, earning sales now based on their past reputation for being innovators and a quality manufacturer.
Now they engage in shameless malfeasance (installing rootkits on hard drives of legitimate paying customers), engage in fraud (sell product based on features, e.g., OtherOS, and then take it away) and then attack the consumer directly when they try to take back control of their own hardware and help others enjoy their right of first sale.
Then, in various products (from MP3 players to notebooks to cameras) they kept pushing their stupid MemoryStick form factor, despite the existence of very workable existing standards (CF, MMC/SD, or even XD), an obvious means to increase revenue through their own costly proprietary (yet slow and low capacity) sole-sourced accessories.
When did this pattern start? Remember when Sony used to be pro consumer (e.g., sony walkman, VCRs and the betamax case, dual deck cassette systems, etc)? Did their anti-consumer agenda start when Sony bought up music labels?
Frak Sony. They're not too large to fail and if enough people say ENOUGH, they will either fail or they will change their ways and bring back the Sony we once knew.
Yes, I do own that copy of the software, inasmuch as I own any book I buy. I own it and can do whatever I please per the first sale doctrine, short of violating copyright protections.
Let us not forget that Toyota has become pretty hostile to real hot rodders and today's TRD products are a complete joke. Gone are the days of actively supporting the hot rodding and motorcrossing community with real performance parts for hot cars like the MR-2 (mechanicallt supercharged and later turbocharged) and Supra (Sequential twin turbocharged) sportscars.
Their idea of modding today is to sell body cladding and spoilers, and TRD decals. They have wholly embraced the ricer market segment, and actively discourage people from making real performance improvements. Should it really surprise anyone that Toyota would respect Apple's egomaniacal control over already-purchased iPhones?
I own my iPhones. Even if I dump AT&T today, I will maintain ownership of my iPhones. I am not renting nor leasing them, nor are they a work for hire under contract. They are commodity goods sold off the shelf, so therefore the first sale doctrine applies - along with bypassing DRM for the purpose of interoperability. Courts have upheld jailbreaking as a legal activity so why is Apple still fighting it? I am a jailbreaker, and yet I still buy apps from the app store, and even occasionally buy tracks through iTunes rather than dig out certain CDs to re-rip them.
Why do I jailbreak? So I can tweak the GUI. So I can run SBSettings, and so I can ssh to my iPhone and custom-build nagios so I can control servers from anywhere - and ssh into a box on the road when absolutely required. I don't use it for anything nefarious like "stealing"[sic] software or anything like that. So I can tweak settings a lot more than the default settings applet allows. So I can turn off phone or data separately with ease, and so I can have individual apps override screen brightness for individual apps rather than a single global setting Apple seems to think should apply to everyone for all situations - oh, and so I can disable rotation support quickly (for TomTom GPS for example - legally purchased through the app store well after I jailbroke my phone, by the way!) rather than distracting myself drilling down through a bunch of menus to disable it while driving.
Apple on their way to making Jobs rich: took blueboxing mainstream, promoting easy theft of services.
Apple now that Jobs is fabulously wealthy: stealing right of first sale from their own customers and discouraging customers from taking back functionality of their legally-owned product.
Previous years used conventional hydraulics (FX3 in models through 1995, F45 from 1996 through 2002), with an adjustable electronically-controlled valve to change stiffness on the fly. It worked really well too - it could make driving on cobblestone or grooved pavement tolerable. I keep mine on the stiffest setting most of the time, unless the road conditions are really bad. My car has the Z51 suspension and FX3 selective ride control - both came standard in my car (optional in the base model then - now all Corvettes from the lowly base model all the way up to ZR1 get this feature standard).
Unfortunately the delay is intentional. My Saab has this delay and it's damn annoying. People who don't know better might think it's turbo lag but those cars have very little turbo lag; it is a delay in tip-in. It is supposedly a safety feature to prevent idiots from blaming the manufacturer when they hit the wrong pedal, but when I want my car to go, I want it to go NOW, damn it! I forgot exactly how long the delay is but it's between 1/3 and 1/2 second, and it is designed to do that intentionally.
Look at the cost of software development ($$$, time, etc.) and ask yourself exactly how much would you have to pay, or in the case of "free" software, wait for a program that does what and only what you do, versus a program which offers tremendous functionality to cover the needs of most users.
Features you don't use != bloat. I don't use solvers in spreadsheets, and rarely ever use pivot tables, and I practically never use charts any more. However, many people in the corporate world do, and many people serving the corporate world need those features as well. That I do not need those features does not make Open^H^H^H^HLibreOffice or microsoft office or iwork bloated.
How much would Microsoft Office cost if there were 25 different versions (in each language) which required support, updates, and so on? And, what happens that one time you do need to make a presentation to a client and they want to see the data not in a classical spreadsheet, but in a graphical chart, or that one time you need to use the solver, or need to run $foo and darn it, if only you hadn't bought the most basic version of Excel for bloat-hating geeks?
Also, isn't it hypocritical that geeks who stuff themselves full of doritos, twinkies, and mountain dew all day long are complaining about bloat? (KIDDING HERE, disclaimer included for the personality-challenged)
Top Gear's tests cover the real-world driving conditions of very few people. Sure, there are people who flog exotic and sportscars on the street and people who have been to the fun side of 185mph, but it doesn't reflect the the expectations of 99.5% of the driving population (except maybe in Germany and Italy), so based on the people criticizing Top Gear, why bother watching the show at all?
That show shows what cars are capable under very demanding driving conditions - as in driving the car flat out. I have a car that would achieve 33mpg on the highway and 27mpg combined under normal driving conditions (with the stock eprom - and that includes Boston-area rush hour traffic on that parking lot Route 128 that we jokingly call a highway) or 26-27 on the highway and 19-23 mpg combined (tuner eprom custom programmed based on OBD data logs plus a few ECM hacks) but over 180 it would be well under 10mpg. That means the range would be maybe 100-150 miles and if that were reported it would not be untrue, even if the real-world range is 375-400 miles.
When was the last time you saw Top Gear give a Consumer Reports review of a car and report long-term real-world fuel economy under commuter-style driving conditions? That Tesla is making a big deal of this is frigging ridiculous. Having said that, I look forward to the day I see one stuck with a dead battery in the middle of Route 128 or Route 93 and hope I have my camera with me when that happens.:-D
Nokia defaulted on the game the day they partnered with Microsoft on Windows Phone 7. Nokia personnel and shareholders just haven't felt the effects of their loss yet.
What you say is true only with a given sensor type/technology. As megapixels counts increase, most manufacturers manage to increase the S/N ratio at the detection and amplification stages often resulting in a net improvement in image quality. Compare yesteryear's 2 megapixel DSLRs or even medium format camera backs to today's 18-24 megapixel DSLRs. The original DSLR cameras were limited to maybe ISO1600 max and were very, very noisy, whereas with today's DSLRs if you expose properly you can shoot at ISO1600-3200 or even ISO6400 all day long, or if you are underexposing slightly, moderate noise reduction can clean the image right up with little loss in image quality. Severely underexposed images though (by like, 2+ stops) will exhibit more noise and thus more loss of detail after postprocessing but ISO 1600 won't be a problem in almost any case with any current DSLR body from the major players.
The problem with your theory is we are not comparing apples to apples. Photosite size reduction/megapixel increase is not the sole advancement between most generations of sensor.
You do realize that cellphone sensors are limited by diffraction so while you can resolve finer detail through unsharp masks, physics does limit the usable resolution of optical sensors. Making things worse, the need for anti-aliasing filters will further soften the photos. APS-C DSLRs have reached the point where they are diffraction limited to f/8.0 and yet while the megapixel race has slowed down a bit, it has not yet ended. If you need a 100% crop from the newest APS-C cameras, it requires minor to moderat sharpening during postprocessing. As the sensor size decreases the circle of confusion becomes relatively larger as the photo sites ("pixels") decrease.
Unless they find some way to increase the lens size (which will require bending space-time) the megapixel race is utterly pointless, because the resulting photos will either appear softer and softer, or more and more artificial due to requiring more and more sharpening.
Also, if your 320gig worth of invaluable childrens' TV show only exists on your ISPs servers, you should jump out of a high window right now because you are too stupid to live.
That rule ought to be expanded to include people who buy into the "cloud computing" idea - which is what these people were doing in an ad-hoc manner.
I'd like to see you use this argument in reverse, in respect to what the rag The New York Times has been pulling:
Share more. If you want the copyright police to tax your school note books, doodles and bed time songs to your children just go on like this. Ideas should not be exploited. Write a book and you are protected. Write a an online "newspaper article" and publish it immediately and you really did not try to package and sell it did you?
You might displace some garden snails, scorpions, or spotted owls by putting up a solar farm.
Don't put up a wind farm, because old-style high-rpm windmills that aren't even used for large-scale electricity production was known to kill birds every now and then, so all wind power is bad. Off the coast is even worse because senators do not want to put up with the eyesore as they cruise around in their yachts.
Hydroelectric? you can't dam up any rivers; red squirrels might lose their homes and have to relocate to a new tree.
There is always an argument against everything. Environmentalists are more BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone) than NIMBY.
Yes, and in related breaking news, it has been discovered that water is indeed wet!
I am soo tired of the sensationalized stories surrounding Japan's "nuclear crisis." I'm interested in hearing objective news grounded in science, and that there are "trace amounts" of plutonium found on the grounds surrounding the reactor is only barely newsworthy. What is newsworthy is that the containment units withstood a 9.0 quake which is many orders of magnitude greater than the design specified. That is impressive and only underscores just how safe nuclear power is.
The lesson for the future is to include redundant diesel generators, and always, always keep more diesel on hand for those generators even when the reactors are scheduled for decomission in the immediate future, because you never know when something like, Oh, I don't know, maybe a 9.0 earthquake might occur?:)
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At risk of invoking Godwin's law, China criticising the USA for censorship today would be like Nazi Germany criticizing the UK for fascism during WWII.
We won't - it will become a political tool rather than a humanitarian crisis. We (collective we) will blame the Army Corps of Engineers for building an inadequate levee, ignoring that they actually recommended an effective design but only got approval to build a superficial levee. Then, we will blame $CURRENT_ADMINISTRATION because obviously the $NATURAL_DISASTER was a government conspiracy designed to wipe out $UNDESIRABLE_ETHNIC_GROUP because $POLITICIAN hates $UNDESIRABLE_ETHNIC_GROUP. The fact that $GOVERNMENT_AGENCY is prevented by federal law from stepping in and $RESPONSIVE_ACTION until $LOCAL_OFFICIAL declares a state of emergency and requests assistance will go ignored by press and the people who hate $PRESIDENT and they'll get to spout their stupidity all over $NEWS_NETWORK_OF_CHOICE.
You'd like to believe natural disasters bring out the best in humanity, but really it comes down to culture. In our culture (or lack thereof) we tend to be petty and polarized and put a political spin on everything, and our press will sensationalize the stupidity because it is good for ratings.
And, some people still blame Katrina on Bush.
Do something irresponsible (build a seaside city below sea level, build a nuclear reactor at sea level on the shore in an area known for getting hit with tsunami) and something is bound to go horribly wrong sooner or later.
Well, at least it's rear wheel drive! ;)
The funny thing about the whole boycott thing is boycotting one day won't hurt sony in the slightest, just as boycotting Mobil for one day would not hurt Mobil at all. All you are doing is delaying your purchase for a day.
Want to hurt a publicly-traded company? Organize a large-scale boycott for a minimum of one quarter. THAT is how you can make Sony execs notice; when the quarterly results show a huge drop in revenue shareholders will be screaming for blood.
Otherwise, don't even bother. If you're going to buy a Sony LCD television, go ahead and buy it on 04/16 because if you delay it to 04/17 it makes no difference to Sony.
So true - go to any Nikon forum and you'll see Canon fans posting crap, go to Canon forums and see Nikon fans posting crap - usually in the form of gross misinformation to "prove" their choice of camera is better, completely ignoring the fact that they're just tools and there is no one single BFH that works for all situations.
It seems every market has that kind of blind follower - be it cars (okay admittedly my username includes my favorite car, but I don't make excuses for GM. GM sucks and should have been allowed to fail, IMHO), computers (witness Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux crap here on a daily basis), phones (witness iPhone vs. Android crap here on a daily basis), sports (Sox suck! No, Yankees suck! No, you suck! No, you suck!), and so on. People like something and raise them to the level if idols and worship them for some reason. They forget sports is just entertainment, that technology is just tools, and cars are tools with an artistic shell.
I hate most Mercedes vehicles, but that doesn't mean I need to go trolling about how much greater the cars I like are better than Mercedes - because the cars I choose for my purposes would not fit the purposes or tastes of the next person. Likewise, in the past I have chosen vehicles I HATED because they were practical for my purpose and at the time 99% of my driving was for business, and no matter how you try, you simply can't haul a load of servers in a sportscar or even a sports sedan.
Irrational people will be irrational, douchebags will be douchebags, and rational people will be rational (although generally rational people may on occasion seek irrational enjoyment from mocking douchebags and trolls). Some people feel the irrational need to support the idea that the product/team/person/thing/place they like/bought/watch/live is best, and therefore everyone else makes the wrong decision because their choice sucks.
But, let me wrap this up by saying that Sony sucks - and I am not being irrational here. ;)
I responded many years ago before the rootkit by not buying Sony products and by recommending Samsung, LG, or even Vizio screens for clients who need large wall-mounted screens in their offices, conference rooms, etc.
I started avoided Sony when I found their replacement parts costs to be obscene when I wanted to repair my DVP-S360 DVD player - I paid a premium for the Sony for the feature set (mainly the full-feature front-panel controls) and it turned out the entire run was bad and became known for failing just after warranty. I priced out replacement parts but by then competitors were offering DVD players that could play various mpeg4 videos and the part I needed cost more than competitor offerings, and I could even get a Sony DVD player for a few dollars more.
Another thing is in a lot of Sony products they use resistors in place of fuses, making troubleshooting more time consuming. Between that and cold solder joints in their televisions, it was obvious Sony decided to just start phoning it in, earning sales now based on their past reputation for being innovators and a quality manufacturer.
Now they engage in shameless malfeasance (installing rootkits on hard drives of legitimate paying customers), engage in fraud (sell product based on features, e.g., OtherOS, and then take it away) and then attack the consumer directly when they try to take back control of their own hardware and help others enjoy their right of first sale.
Then, in various products (from MP3 players to notebooks to cameras) they kept pushing their stupid MemoryStick form factor, despite the existence of very workable existing standards (CF, MMC/SD, or even XD), an obvious means to increase revenue through their own costly proprietary (yet slow and low capacity) sole-sourced accessories.
When did this pattern start? Remember when Sony used to be pro consumer (e.g., sony walkman, VCRs and the betamax case, dual deck cassette systems, etc)? Did their anti-consumer agenda start when Sony bought up music labels?
Frak Sony. They're not too large to fail and if enough people say ENOUGH, they will either fail or they will change their ways and bring back the Sony we once knew.
Yes, I do own that copy of the software, inasmuch as I own any book I buy. I own it and can do whatever I please per the first sale doctrine, short of violating copyright protections.
Stop buying into lobbyists' doubletalk.
SCO is a grease spot under Novell's shoe.
Let us not forget that Toyota has become pretty hostile to real hot rodders and today's TRD products are a complete joke. Gone are the days of actively supporting the hot rodding and motorcrossing community with real performance parts for hot cars like the MR-2 (mechanicallt supercharged and later turbocharged) and Supra (Sequential twin turbocharged) sportscars.
Their idea of modding today is to sell body cladding and spoilers, and TRD decals. They have wholly embraced the ricer market segment, and actively discourage people from making real performance improvements. Should it really surprise anyone that Toyota would respect Apple's egomaniacal control over already-purchased iPhones?
I own my iPhones. Even if I dump AT&T today, I will maintain ownership of my iPhones. I am not renting nor leasing them, nor are they a work for hire under contract. They are commodity goods sold off the shelf, so therefore the first sale doctrine applies - along with bypassing DRM for the purpose of interoperability. Courts have upheld jailbreaking as a legal activity so why is Apple still fighting it? I am a jailbreaker, and yet I still buy apps from the app store, and even occasionally buy tracks through iTunes rather than dig out certain CDs to re-rip them.
Why do I jailbreak? So I can tweak the GUI. So I can run SBSettings, and so I can ssh to my iPhone and custom-build nagios so I can control servers from anywhere - and ssh into a box on the road when absolutely required. I don't use it for anything nefarious like "stealing"[sic] software or anything like that. So I can tweak settings a lot more than the default settings applet allows. So I can turn off phone or data separately with ease, and so I can have individual apps override screen brightness for individual apps rather than a single global setting Apple seems to think should apply to everyone for all situations - oh, and so I can disable rotation support quickly (for TomTom GPS for example - legally purchased through the app store well after I jailbroke my phone, by the way!) rather than distracting myself drilling down through a bunch of menus to disable it while driving.
Apple on their way to making Jobs rich: took blueboxing mainstream, promoting easy theft of services.
Apple now that Jobs is fabulously wealthy: stealing right of first sale from their own customers and discouraging customers from taking back functionality of their legally-owned product.
hmmm, Sony fanbois abusing mod points.
Since the 2003 model year.
Previous years used conventional hydraulics (FX3 in models through 1995, F45 from 1996 through 2002), with an adjustable electronically-controlled valve to change stiffness on the fly. It worked really well too - it could make driving on cobblestone or grooved pavement tolerable. I keep mine on the stiffest setting most of the time, unless the road conditions are really bad. My car has the Z51 suspension and FX3 selective ride control - both came standard in my car (optional in the base model then - now all Corvettes from the lowly base model all the way up to ZR1 get this feature standard).
Unfortunately the delay is intentional. My Saab has this delay and it's damn annoying. People who don't know better might think it's turbo lag but those cars have very little turbo lag; it is a delay in tip-in. It is supposedly a safety feature to prevent idiots from blaming the manufacturer when they hit the wrong pedal, but when I want my car to go, I want it to go NOW, damn it! I forgot exactly how long the delay is but it's between 1/3 and 1/2 second, and it is designed to do that intentionally.
No one has yet posted the obligatory ". . .and nothing of value was lost."
Look at the cost of software development ($$$, time, etc.) and ask yourself exactly how much would you have to pay, or in the case of "free" software, wait for a program that does what and only what you do, versus a program which offers tremendous functionality to cover the needs of most users.
Features you don't use != bloat. I don't use solvers in spreadsheets, and rarely ever use pivot tables, and I practically never use charts any more. However, many people in the corporate world do, and many people serving the corporate world need those features as well. That I do not need those features does not make Open^H^H^H^HLibreOffice or microsoft office or iwork bloated.
How much would Microsoft Office cost if there were 25 different versions (in each language) which required support, updates, and so on? And, what happens that one time you do need to make a presentation to a client and they want to see the data not in a classical spreadsheet, but in a graphical chart, or that one time you need to use the solver, or need to run $foo and darn it, if only you hadn't bought the most basic version of Excel for bloat-hating geeks?
Also, isn't it hypocritical that geeks who stuff themselves full of doritos, twinkies, and mountain dew all day long are complaining about bloat? (KIDDING HERE, disclaimer included for the personality-challenged)
Top Gear's tests cover the real-world driving conditions of very few people. Sure, there are people who flog exotic and sportscars on the street and people who have been to the fun side of 185mph, but it doesn't reflect the the expectations of 99.5% of the driving population (except maybe in Germany and Italy), so based on the people criticizing Top Gear, why bother watching the show at all?
That show shows what cars are capable under very demanding driving conditions - as in driving the car flat out. I have a car that would achieve 33mpg on the highway and 27mpg combined under normal driving conditions (with the stock eprom - and that includes Boston-area rush hour traffic on that parking lot Route 128 that we jokingly call a highway) or 26-27 on the highway and 19-23 mpg combined (tuner eprom custom programmed based on OBD data logs plus a few ECM hacks) but over 180 it would be well under 10mpg. That means the range would be maybe 100-150 miles and if that were reported it would not be untrue, even if the real-world range is 375-400 miles.
When was the last time you saw Top Gear give a Consumer Reports review of a car and report long-term real-world fuel economy under commuter-style driving conditions? That Tesla is making a big deal of this is frigging ridiculous. Having said that, I look forward to the day I see one stuck with a dead battery in the middle of Route 128 or Route 93 and hope I have my camera with me when that happens. :-D
Nokia defaulted on the game the day they partnered with Microsoft on Windows Phone 7. Nokia personnel and shareholders just haven't felt the effects of their loss yet.
What you say is true only with a given sensor type/technology. As megapixels counts increase, most manufacturers manage to increase the S/N ratio at the detection and amplification stages often resulting in a net improvement in image quality. Compare yesteryear's 2 megapixel DSLRs or even medium format camera backs to today's 18-24 megapixel DSLRs. The original DSLR cameras were limited to maybe ISO1600 max and were very, very noisy, whereas with today's DSLRs if you expose properly you can shoot at ISO1600-3200 or even ISO6400 all day long, or if you are underexposing slightly, moderate noise reduction can clean the image right up with little loss in image quality. Severely underexposed images though (by like, 2+ stops) will exhibit more noise and thus more loss of detail after postprocessing but ISO 1600 won't be a problem in almost any case with any current DSLR body from the major players.
The problem with your theory is we are not comparing apples to apples. Photosite size reduction/megapixel increase is not the sole advancement between most generations of sensor.
You do realize that cellphone sensors are limited by diffraction so while you can resolve finer detail through unsharp masks, physics does limit the usable resolution of optical sensors. Making things worse, the need for anti-aliasing filters will further soften the photos. APS-C DSLRs have reached the point where they are diffraction limited to f/8.0 and yet while the megapixel race has slowed down a bit, it has not yet ended. If you need a 100% crop from the newest APS-C cameras, it requires minor to moderat sharpening during postprocessing. As the sensor size decreases the circle of confusion becomes relatively larger as the photo sites ("pixels") decrease.
Unless they find some way to increase the lens size (which will require bending space-time) the megapixel race is utterly pointless, because the resulting photos will either appear softer and softer, or more and more artificial due to requiring more and more sharpening.
That rule ought to be expanded to include people who buy into the "cloud computing" idea - which is what these people were doing in an ad-hoc manner.
I'd like to see you use this argument in reverse, in respect to what the rag The New York Times has been pulling:
Share more. If you want the copyright police to tax your school note books, doodles and bed time songs to your children just go on like this. Ideas should not be exploited. Write a book and you are protected. Write a an online "newspaper article" and publish it immediately and you really did not try to package and sell it did you?
You might displace some garden snails, scorpions, or spotted owls by putting up a solar farm.
Don't put up a wind farm, because old-style high-rpm windmills that aren't even used for large-scale electricity production was known to kill birds every now and then, so all wind power is bad. Off the coast is even worse because senators do not want to put up with the eyesore as they cruise around in their yachts.
Hydroelectric? you can't dam up any rivers; red squirrels might lose their homes and have to relocate to a new tree.
There is always an argument against everything. Environmentalists are more BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone) than NIMBY.
tag the story toosoon :)
Yes, and in related breaking news, it has been discovered that water is indeed wet!
I am soo tired of the sensationalized stories surrounding Japan's "nuclear crisis." I'm interested in hearing objective news grounded in science, and that there are "trace amounts" of plutonium found on the grounds surrounding the reactor is only barely newsworthy. What is newsworthy is that the containment units withstood a 9.0 quake which is many orders of magnitude greater than the design specified. That is impressive and only underscores just how safe nuclear power is.
The lesson for the future is to include redundant diesel generators, and always, always keep more diesel on hand for those generators even when the reactors are scheduled for decomission in the immediate future, because you never know when something like, Oh, I don't know, maybe a 9.0 earthquake might occur? :)