So... about normal for the tech industry then.. Carry on.

Good point. If you wanted a security conference that secure, don't make it a conference. Just gather at a local bar and take over the back half of the place. Sometimes the best places to have private conversations is in a crowd.

And a lanyard with something that loooks like an employee id badge. Even better if the lanyard is from oen of the local media outlets or newspapers. You can usually pick up a handful when they sponsor charity events and such.

The camera, good size lens and lens hood are good too. Also, make sure you practice with the gear so you really do look like you know what you're doing.

Hesitation will get you caught every time. Focus on what you're doing, be professionally courteous, but act and assume you're going to get the shot. And 9 times out of 10, you will.

Damn, wish I had some mod points. Upvote!

ps. does the name Grant Boucher mean anything to you?

Unless there was some monetary benefit to rendering at resolutions higher than your target media, no FX team is going to spend the additional cycles on merely resolution when they could be spending that time, assuming they had it, on more complex effects.

Now if they'd kept / archived the original scene and asset data, they'd be 80% of the way to re-rendering the shots as needed at 1080p.

For instance, some of the beauty pass shots on the Enterprise would render at damned near real time on modern hardware and a modern render engine.

Sounds like the twinkle you saw was more likely from compression artifacting than intentional effects by the FX crew.

Single pixel, high contrast points will flicker like mad when compressed. Hell, they flicker even straight out of the renderer at times.

I routinely print up to 17x24 with images from my Nikon D50 (6mp). A touch of sharpening, some smart blur, and, if needed, a touch up here and there and even printing at 75-100 pix/inch gives you a great photo.

Look at the photo of the caribiner. Look closely along the inner line of the caribiner and the rock. You'll see a bit of.. mushiness.. or blurred noise there. That's an artifact of the supersampling and processing being used to get the 38mpx sized images out of a censor that is physically lower resolution than that.

There are noise artifacts all over the images, and anywhere you get a sharp contrast in color or tone, you'll get that noise.

It's a *fantastic* image for a camera phone. The optics on Nokia's phones have always been top notch, as have their censors (the n95 notwithstanding) and LED flashes. It's the OS on the phone that has always been their week spot.

But if I can spend $600 for a reasonably capable phone with optics and censor of this level, I"ll count it a bargain.

Kodak's failures had nothing to do with what optics they used or didn't use.

The book "The White Plague" by Frank Herbert already has something similar to this. Scientist sees his family killed by an IRA bomb in Ireland, goes nuts and creates a plague that targets only Irish women. Spreads and kills most females worldwide. Kind of a scary book.

[citation needed]

I agree. So let's drop income taxes to a flat 15% indexed to the capital gains tax rate. And that 15% would be a flat tax on gross income with no little extras like fica, etc.. thrown in. *everyone* pays $ 0.15 for every dollar of income they receive. Simple.

I look at it this way, his parents *did* work hard and earn their wealth, their house, etc. They should have the right to do with it as they see fit. The same goes for a company. The potential for their son to do well with the house or the business, just as there is potential for the son to fritter it all away on hookers and blow.

But it comes down to the right of the parents to dispose of their property in the way they see fit, and the right of the son to receive that property should the parents give it to him. It's also his right as a human being to fail or succeed on his own merits with the resources he inherits.

People has lost sight of the power of generational thinking when it comes to estate and wealth planning. The decisions I make now effect me immediately, my children shortly and my eventual grand-children in the long term.

Not necessarily. If the ruling that MP3's are, legally, the same as a material object, then the RIAA can argue that putting an mp3 up on bit torrent for X-thousand people to download is the equivalent of manufacturing X-thousand counterfeit copies and distributing them.

That's actually what you're doing, but currently the legal status of MP3's vis a vis material objects is up in the air.

I'm not sure I want this ruling to go in ReDigi's favor. At least not yet.

Ahh.. someone has seen the man behind the curtain. It's amazing how many ways your technological priesthood can make it's displeasure known to the gods of the spreadsheets in the corner offices.