Wow, what's not to understand here?

1. Animal adapts to its native environment, and survives just fine.
2. Humans introduce invasive, non-native species that displace and/or devastate native species. Being capable of awareness of our environment and capable of compassion, we eventually feel like fuck-ups for this. "Damn, made a mess. Maybe should go clean it up."
3. We try to do something about it.

It's #2 that's key, and it doesn't require being a "hippie" to get it. Even non-hippies manage to keep a clean house. Is that sentiment so hard to grok?

Hell, I love to shoot large format cameras. Forget the fossil fuels, those things burn souls! :D

Seriously though, the control and creativity afforded by view camera movements is fantastic and the resolution of sheet film rocks. Large format cameras come in both point-and-shoot variants (e.g. old press cameras) and the classic view camera design. View camera style is pretty much diametrically opposed to point-and-shoot style: using a view camera has both a certain meditative workflow and encourages the photographer to develop good visualization skills, i.e. to see the photograph before taking the photograph. Both are a blast in their own way, and it's great seeing those big, big negatives on the light table.

Seriously, you haven't researched this any better than just using iBooks for managing your research library? Three solutions right off the top: GoodReader, Evernote and Papers all offer a selection of features that address (each a bit differently) your scenario. Many folks I know use more than one of those tools depending on the specific situation.

On a related note, there are some airlines that have deployed boarding passes via a scannable image displayed on your smartphone's display... but let's just say that this technology seems to have a few bugs. A friend recently tried this, but the image didn't scan. Oops. Back out of security to get a proper boarding pass, back through the security line, etc. Apparently a Retina Display isn't good enough for the scanner. /snerk

At this point it's best to play it safe with a printed boarding pass as a backup until you're proven to your satisfaction that the paperless stuff actually works with your phone and airline.

At that point, "quick and easy" math is largely irrelevant. If you can drive the MM x MM pixel display in the first place, you'll just apply an appropriate image filter to provide the best upscaled visuals -- which isn't necessarily an integer-multiple pixel expansion.

Observation: your web browser is already doing this constantly; a heck of a lot of web images are scaled these days (although generally downscaled rather than upscaled as we're talking about here).

Any attempt by the MPEG-LA to renege on this grant (a massive public announcement within this industry) would be blocked by Estoppel (at least in legal systems which have that concept). Plus MPEG-LA has the additional deterrent that the backlash would be exactly what they're trying to avoid, only worse: it would promote market fear of H.264 for web use, forcing one of the format's competitors to rise to the forefront.

Simply put: no. Software "averaging" may smooth out noise, but it will not add information that was not present in the first place. Missing dynamic range at the hardware is just not there to be recovered in software. In digital camera sensors, dynamic range is limited by saturation of the sensor's photosites. Once a photosite has collected enough photons, it registers maximum charge -- information about any further photons collected at that photosite during the exposure is lost. In fact, adding more photosites per unit area increases the per-photosite noise and chip areal overhead. Noise reduces dynamic range at the low end, and less charge capacity per photosite reduces dynamic range at the high end.

As another poster notes, you might change the effective exposure received by each photosite (perhaps by Bayer-array like neutral-density filtering). Or you can do what Fuji did with the S3 pro: make a matrix of photosites of different sizes/sensitivites to improve dynamic range. Fuji's sensor, while nice, has hardly taken over the digital imaging world.

On a more constructive note, Ctein wrote up a nice exposition on The Online Photographer about both near-term sensor technologies entering production and long-term avenues for advancement in digital imaging technology.

It's more than that: it's also for every case where the lookup logic is NOT handled by the database. Consider when queries are fielded by a separate service, such as a dedicated search engine (e.g. Solr/Lucene), leaving the database is relegated to just primary key lookup for full records/documents. At that time the benefits and tradeoffs offered by the various NoSQL solutions suddenly become a LOT more interesting, because that's what these tools specialize in.

This has already been done. The first I personally encountered such was in a then-new university building in the mid-90's. It had security panels at various points with individual illuminated LED display buttons. When not active, each button face was a rather enigmatic black. On the first press, the panels would "wake up", make (I kid you not) a sci-fi show warbling sound and scrambling animation on each keyface, then present a set of shuffled digits on the various keys. Each press reshuffled the displays.

This made perfect sense, since back in the 80's a sysadmin for the local university showed me the "breathe on the keypad" trick to see what keys are being pressed by users. Forget fancy Photoshop or IR imaging tricks...

Given how incongruous the randomizing keypads were at the time, part of me always suspected that they weren't actually security panels but part of a long-running installation art piece. The cameras wouldn't have been even a bit out of place. ;-)

Or perhaps more interestingly: is the Rb gene the newt's only defense against cancer? Specifically, have newts developed alternative cancer defenses that support Rb suppression during regeneration?

git cherry-pick newt/5f5c3c4f

Sniping is not a problem, it is a solution. You have to be a fairly naive eBay bidder to reveal your bid limit before bidding is essentially over. If you place a plain bid, you are vulnerable to 1) bidding wars from weak-willed folks (i.e. human beings) who don't set a personal bidding limit and 2) those who will "data mine" by incrementally upping their bid until they beat the top bidder, while at the same time trying to limit their upside risk. From a bidder's perspective, a snipe is ideal: it encourages you to do your research and set a firm bid limit up-front. I find this to be a vastly more relaxing way of bidding, since I've done my homework beforehand and avoid the temptation of stupid bidding wars. Likewise, it doesn't expose your bid (or even your intention to bid) until the last moment.

Frankly, I think sniping should be the standard bid mechanism for eBay auctions. I suspect that they'd never do it because it would reduce revenue by some amount.

[Pause for evil laughter omitted]

Note that MS under Gates' watch had successful (and ruthless) business practices to make sure that MS made heaping tons of money, even without being a major market innovator. It was often easier to let others innovate, then use a combination of financial might, second-mover advantage, and sometimes a bit 'o market leverage to move in and take over.

I'm frankly a bit shocked at how much this news item echoes Ballmer's earlier pathetic whinging about iPod and then iPhone. It's unacceptable that a major corporate CEO should sound like such a broken record when the message being repeated is "failure!"

How about "Rob Pike Decries Complexity of Java, C++" instead?

|Rob Pike| >> |Google Engineer|

To provide some concete figures here, 4x5 large format film (the smallest format considered "large") can be drum-scanned to produce images in the 200-300 megapixels equivalent range. Quadruple that for 8x10 film. Ultra-large format (ULF) formats are even larger, up to 20x24 inch film. Folks working with hybrid (analog/digital) processes with ULF mostly don't bother with full drum-scan resolution. Even for very large prints, there's just a stupidly large amount of information. And the real dynamic range and highlight behavior for black and white film blows all current digital sensors out of the water.

I had to laugh at that gigapixel photo of Obama's inaguration -- all sorts of artifacts along the stitch boundaries. A single wide-angle 8x10 (or hell, 8x20) image would have blown it away.