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Comment Lazy eye? not exactly. (Score 1) 386

The term lazy eye is used for a related condition called amblyopia, not strabismus itself. Strabismus causes double vision because both eyes are not aligned in a manner that allows the brain to fuse both pictures together to form a single 3D image. The brain attenuates the signal from the misaligned eye in order to reduce double vision. The reduction of vision in that eye is a condition called amblyopia, or lazy eye. Since you need 2 eyes to form a 3D image, people with amblyopia have reduced depth perception.

Looking at 3D TV isn't doing to give you strabismus or amblyopia. The risk to children is that until a certain age, the section of your brain that controls 3D fusion is still developing so if they spend all their time looking crosseyed at a tv, the brain may calibrate itself to provide fusion while the eyes are crossed. That would result in double vision when the eyes are properly aligned. That's why it's important to have a child treated for strabismus as early as possible.

Comment Re:Windows Live Photo Gallery (Score 1) 326

For the average uninformed user, you have a point. However you are nowhere near correct. There's a reason all professional image management tools on the market, plus Picasa store their edits in a database. Modifying the original is extremely destructive. You can't get your image data back once you save over top your original. Every time you modify and save your data, it will degrade considerably.

Picasa maintains the original which is by definition the highest quality copy of the file. By taking the original and applying edits on the fly every time you open the file, you are assured of having the best quality image possible and the flexibility to change one of your edits. If you open a file that has been saved 5 times as a jpg then you're going to have a blurry, noisy piece of crap.

Every professional grade photo manager saves edits to a database. Your camera's vendor's raw file developer does too, although it the database is embedded in the raw file. Even Photoshop users after their 3rd day using the program don't perform edits directly on on the background layer. Picasa does this too, and it's a huge bonus. You're getting close to professional grade photo management for free.

Maybe Picasa needs to be more up front about how it's managing its edits, and provide more options to back up your catalog. The notion that Picasa should be overwriting your jpg files every time you twiddle with something is dead wrong.

Comment CISS systems and bulk ink (Score 2, Informative) 651

I resisted buying an inkjet for years, preferring instead to use an HP business laser printer. After looking at horrible Costco soft proofs for some photos I was going to print, I decided that instead of buying a $50 costco printer I'd buy a $50 inkjet printer and use after market inks.

Only suckers by genuine OEM ink. Get yourself a Continuous Ink Supply System (CISS). They're basically a bunch of dummy cartridges that connect to bulk ink tanks that sit outside the printer. A good CISS vendor such as Inkjetfly or inkrepublic will sell you inks that closely match your OEM ink for 1/10th the price. Reputable vendors even provide ICC profiles for their ink and common papers, although if you're serious you'll want to pick up something like a spyder 3 print sr that will generate your own profiles. That will effectively lower your printer costs to the price of the paper. The output on an inkjet is actually much better than someplace like Costco, and you have much more control over how your prints will come out. The downside is a CISS requires more maintenance than cartridges and can be difficult to set up.

Of course now I regret printing anything because trying to frame anything larger than 4x6 is practically impossible. Frames, mats, photo paper and your camera's frame all use incompatible aspect ratios. If you think printer ink is expensive, wait until you try to buy non-standard framing supplies!

Comment Re:Religious Viewers= $ (Score 1) 955

So the afterlife was more ridiculous than all the other ridiculous concepts like smoke monsters and time travelling islands just because you are an athiest? Come on. I'm an athiest and I just considered the whole series as rather outlandish fiction. I don't particularly care if they present a religious aspect because to me it's the same thing as any other fictional plot device.

As others have pointed out, Lost at some point reached a point where the series outlived its intended story arc and the writers scratched their head and said where can we go from here? The plot became more and more outlandish until it broke out of my suspension of disbelief and to be honest I stopped caring about the island as much. Personally I think the writers were smart to just discard the convoluted, steaming pile of dung they created and focus on wrapping up the characters. I don't think there was any way they could tie up all the loose ends with the island in a way that would satisfy people because it would clash with what they had built up in their imagination. People connected emotionally to the characters so it was a smart alternative to tie up a few loose ends and then give the characters closure.

Comment Can't avoid being rear ended at a red light (Score 1) 423

Most traffic accidents happen at a traffic light. It's good practice to leave space somewhere around the vehicle when stopped at a traffic light so that you have an escape route if you find you're about to be rear-ended. If your engine has been switched off, you lose the ability to move out of the way of the dump truck that's coming towards your vehicle.

Comment Re:Arcane? (Score 1) 568

Well...You'd think so, but what ends up happening (as in Canada at the moment) is the government becomes entirely focused on surviving for the next few months and there's little in the way of long term thinking. Our Conservative party has become disturbingly adept at machiavellian political manoeuverings that have kept them in power for an impressive length of time. Unfortunately our main opposition party is so intellectually bankrupt that their platform consists of "elect us and you'll see" and do nothing but go on about the same 3 scandals ad nauseum trying to win short term political points. We're in this hell where the politicians are focused entirely on popping their polling numbers 3 points so they can trigger an election, and nobody is doing anything that the voters actually care about.

Comment Re:improvement (Score 1) 381

It's not an improvement over their current practices. Bell can charge you $100 a gig if they want. You've always been free to buy cheaper service from a competing ISP. Except now Bell is requiring competing ISPs who lease their DSL lines to charge the same rates as Sympatico.

Comment Re:I'm sorry, how is this new? (Score 3, Insightful) 381

Bell Canada is imposing their caps and pricing scheme on customers of all independent ISPs selling DSL connections. So say an ISP is selling an account with a 200 gig limit for 30 bucks. Now Bell is saying that each ISP must pay them a $21 fee for leasing the DSL connection and a surcharge of $1.25 for every gig of usage above 60 gigs. The numbers are approximate but they're close enough.

Comment Re:Canada...an incredible country (Score 1) 237

Actually that's not true. Canada has a human rights commission that runs tribunals for suspected hate speech. These guys get to set the definition of hate speech and enforce rulings from tribunals that require a significantly lower standard of evidence than normal courts.

In any event, the Canadian charter of rights and freedoms contains a notwithstanding clause that allows laws to be passed that will deny any of the rights in section 2, 7-15 of our charter. That's actually extremely frightening when you read what those are. Theoretically Canada could legally reproduce the holocaust, but we can't take away your right to speak French.

Comment Re:Another Stab At a Canadian DMCA (Score 1) 237

The Canadian "Eh" is equivalent to the American use of "Huh"... So we might say "That's cool, eh?" while you might say "That's cool, huh?".

Canadians don't say aboot, but depending where the person's from, he may abbreviate the vowel sound such that it sounds that way to somebody expecting it to be drawn out more.

Comment Re:Good and Bad (Score 1) 526

The rest of the US delivery systems should just be mothballed so they're not paying to staff and maintain them. I suspect that's pretty much the point. They don't really need to keep around 5500 weapons they'll probably never use.

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