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Comment Re:Too late :( (Score 4, Informative) 130

Another possible explanation for why the reef isn't as colorful as in the brochures: cheating on the part of the photographers.

The longer wavelengths of sunlight (such as red or orange) are absorbed quickly by the surrounding water, so even to the naked eye everything appears blue-green in color. The loss of color not only increases vertically through the water column, but also horizontally, so subjects further away from the camera will also appear colorless and indistinct. This effect is true even in apparently clear water, such as that found around tropical coral reefs.

Underwater photographers solve this problem by combining two techniques. The first is to get the camera as close to the photographic subject as possible, minimizing the horizontal loss of color. Wide-angle lenses allow very close focus, or macro lenses, where the subject is often only inches away from the camera. Many serious underwater photographers consider any more than about 3 ft/1 m of water between camera and subject to be unacceptable. The second technique is the use of flash to restore any color lost vertically through the water column. Fill flash, used effectively, will "paint" in any missing colors by providing full-spectrum visible light to the overall exposure.

Comment Define "an increasing number" (Score 5, Interesting) 1319

While I find radical religious fundamentalism just as distasteful as any other atheist, I would also hesitate to launch into Muslim bashing just because one professor has noticed "an increasing number" of Muslim students boycotting his lectures. For all we know, it may be a small number of students boycotting that do not represent a larger trend, and there may be more to the story than reported here (what if, for example, the professor made offensive remarks about Islam and its followers during a lecture, a la Richard Dawkins).

In regards to whether or not these students should be allowed to graduate and become doctors, I'm a little torn. On the one hand, I don't see how someone's stance on evolution is going to have any demonstrable impact on their ability to perform surgery, for example. On the other hand, if a doctor doesn't believe in evolution, they might also not believe that over-prescribing antibiotics can bread new strains of drug resistant bacteria, which could lead to genuine threat to public health.

I guess I'd say that if evolutionary biology is a requirement for the major, then they should be required to pass the course in order to graduate. They don't need to attend the lectures, and they don't need to believe that it's true - but in the same way that we force future doctors to suffer through organic chemistry (often against their will), these students should be required to pass the final exam in order to demonstrate that they are at least capable of understanding the material.

Comment Re:of all the mobile OS's (Score 1) 99

I agree with Anonymous Coward. CM7 feels a lot snappier than WebOS did on my Touch Pad, and my Touch Pad sees a lot more use now than it did before.

For me though it's less about apps or performance than about the web browser. The WebOS browser didn't work correctly with a number of sites that I frequent (with Slashdot being one of them), while the Android browser is pretty solid.

I think that WebOS showed a lot of promise and with a little more support it could have grown into a great OS. Browser issues could have fixed and performance could have been tuned. It's been several weeks since I've used WebOS, but I still find myself trying to use the flick-up-to-close gesture in my iPhone and Android devices.

Comment Re:Unacceptably thin concession (Score 1) 548

You misunderstand me when I say "configure". The last time I installed linux on a new system (a laptop), I ran into the following issues out of the box:

1. The system would mysteriously hang on boot about 1/3 of the time
2. The system would crash when plugging in an external monitor
3. The system would not resume from suspend
4. The mouse/trackpad would stop responding after a couple minutes of use
5. Battery life was cut in half vs. running windows

By "configure", I meant fix all of the above problems - any one of which I view as a critical showstopper issue - by tweaking drivers, startup scripts, and system params. All of these issues were at least as difficult to solve as flipping a BIOS setting.

Comment Re:Unacceptably thin concession (Score 1) 548

This just isn't a concern for me.

Installing and configuring Linux is difficult. Some slashdot readers will disagree with me, but as CS degree-holder and Linux user who has spent hundreds of hours troubleshooting fresh Linux installations on my own machines (and in several cases reverting back to windows because of some deal-breaker hardware incompatibility issue), I can confidently say that I would NEVER recommend to any of my family members that they attempt to install Linux on their own.

In other words, I view the ability to google for solutions when a strange error message pops up (i.e. when the SecureBoot check fails) as a prerequisite to installing Linux (or any operating system, really) on a system.

For the majority of PC buyers, I think that the added security of SecureBoot far outweighs the potential risk that they might get flustered when attempting to install Linux.

Sure - for developers working on Live CDs, I can see how this would be a pain in the ass. But try to think of the bigger picture.

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