I have to disagree. An entry-level DSLR also has picture modes similar to a P&S camera, so you can get the shot if you're in a hurry and don't know exactly how to do it manually. I've had Pentax SLRs for 15 years now, and while the bodies get old, the lenses don't, as long as you look after them. I have a lens that's at least 30 years old but still works on the latest Pentax bodies. I'm never going to be a professional sports photographer or papparazzo - which are the only reasons I could need (or afford) the top Nikon or Canon bodies. For everything else, and especially for enjoying photography as an art form, I would not dream of switching away from Pentax now.

Why do you need the larger SLR lenses? Because they offer wider apertures (lower f-stops), and that gives you two things: better photos in low light (for a given sensor), and more control over depth of field (DOF). If you really want to get in to photography, you want to learn DOF control (which includes manual focusing skills): these days it is, in my opinion, the thing that can make a photo great (or not), and is a core creative tool to have. It is one way you make a photograph tell a story, making it about more than just the objects in the photograph.

Lastly: there's no shame in letting the camera help you at times - don't believe camera snobs who tell you're not a "real photographer" unless you go all manual, all the time. I make an analogy with driving: a stripped down car with a powerful engine and a manual stick shift makes for a rewarding experience on a racetrack ... but you still have to drive to and from the racetrack, and you don't want to be fighting your car when you need to be watching the traffic. With a camera, sometimes you want full creative control, and other times you want to be talking to the people you're shooting rather than futzing with your camera.

If you do use picture modes, though, learn what they do, and why, and that can be educational in itself. For example "Portrait mode" will open up the aperture to offer a shallow depth of field, so that the subject is in focus but the background is nice and soft. However, the camera can't tell you which lens or zoom level to use: portraits are usually better with longer lenses, in the 80-100mm (full frame equivalent) range, since that tends to flatten the features a little (not too much), flattering the subject. That's a guideline, not a rule, and anything goes creatively - but if you ever see a wide-angle close-up of your face, you'll understand why that's not really done except for comic effect ..!

Like Members of Congress in the USA, EU MEPs come in all shapes, sizes, and states of sanity. This guy's just flying a kite, but any such law would apply the the MEPs too, and you can assume some of them have skeletons in their hard drives. Fuhgeddabouttit.

"Isn't there one person that has worked at HP all their life that can step up and be CEO?"

Yes: Ann Livermore, who's been there for nearly 30 years now, and has been rumoured for the top job several times. I expect she will get it at some time in the future, assuming she wants it, and there is a HP left to manage.

The "Ring of Steel" surely refers to the City of London, a.k.a. the Square Mile or Financial District. Security there is heightened because it was an IRA target on more than one occasion. There wasn't much rioting there this time, though I was there in 1999 when the anti-globalisation protests were taking place. But the rest of Greater London is not "ringed" in any real sense - nothing that onerous in Tottenham, for example.

SLA = Service Level Agreement. Instead of saying "off peak = midnight - 6am", the utility agrees to provide power for an agreed duration at the off-peak rate, for those purposes e.g. "3+ continuous hours between 10pm and 6am". They can vary the time to suit their loading: some days it might kick in at 10pm, other days at 3am.

Some days you get only the 3h you absolutely need, other days it might be available all night. You don't care if you're asleep, do you, as long as they meet the SLA and the night jobs get done? If they don't, there would be a penalty, of course.

I'm almost all the way through it. Very sobering stuff, only a few bits I have quibbles with. Or, if you don't have the time, read the synopsis.

The point about the assumption of growth is an important one. The world's financial systems are built on that assumption i.e. anyone who lends money expects to make a profit on the loan, after inflation if applicable. That's true of all loans, from the smallest micro-loan to the trillions in sovereign debt owed by the USA.

The piece on This American Life is basically the same as the Planet Money piece mentioned in the Economist article - the same Planet Money people did both. When TAL did their award-winning show on sub-prime mortgages, it was a compilation of Planet Money shows from the foregoing months.

They're the go-to guys when it comes to clarifying these financial issues. I've been listening to them for years, and can highly recommend them. I mean, how many other journalists actually went out and bought a toxic asset?

Well, I think it's a given that Mathematica support will not be long in coming. Great if you can afford it, which I can't, so I'm waiting for 3rd-party support. Maybe I can roll my own basic tools.

In a Planet Money piece on the market for stolen credit cards last week, they mentioned in passing that Bitcoin is already being used to purchase stolen credit card numbers. If that doesn't attract your government's attention, nothing will.

They also said that they're preparing a story on Bitcoin itself. If Bitcoin survives till the story comes out, that will surely be the kiss of death, in my opinion ...

OK, as long as the main advantage of LaTeX is understood: that it separates content from presentation, just as HTML is supposed to. It doesn't matter whether you put one or two spaces in as you type: LaTex has separate rules for sentence spacing, and a sensible default, which is to add more space at the end of a sentence. That one \frenchspacing statement, at the top of a document, turns it off for the entire document, including sub-documents.

Speculation: for there to be a sexual harassment case, there must have been a complaint, which tells me that the lady in question was not happy with Mr. Hurd. She would also be aware of the misuse of expenses, something to be used against him if needed ... so a sexual harassment complaint might be swept under the carpet, but misuse of expenses would be taken a bit more seriously. Lawyers can more easily sink their teeth that kind of complaint. In my estimation, that is.

I can't talk about current HP culture, since I left there about three years ago to go to university. I was wondering whether I had made the right choice, whether I'd have been better off staying. Financially, sure, but in terms of general quality of life ... nah.

So concrete can be tweaked to remove some pollutants from the atmosphere. Yay. However, do these scientists realise just how much CO2 is released in the production of concrete? Lots. This piece describes the situation well: in cement production, CO2 is released both directly (chemically) and indirectly (burning fossil fuels). The piece also suggest that 5-10% of that CO2 is reabsorbed by the finished concrete, but that's it, and this new "tweak" doesn't make much more of a dent. There's an elephant in the room, and it's made of concrete.

I saw something similar - like "Big Red Scrolling Text" in big red scrolling text, and the page cut off at that point. Looked to me like someone was playing with HTML tags, nothing more. I am running NoScript, as I suspect most Slashdot readers are, so nothing from outside YT got executed at all.

That's what I think too: as the dessicant absorbs water, it loses its effectiveness, so could say you have to "recharge" it so that it can absorb more water. The bad news is that that process will be more energy-intensive in humid climes, since you'd have to heat the dessicant to a higher temperature to get water vapour to leave it quickly enough. The good news is that those humid climes tend to have more sunlight, and thus more scope for using passive solar heating for this job. Someone needs to build a complete system and experiment over a full year, I think, before they start claiming energy savings.

I was looking at other NREL pages, and this one takes a more general look at the use of dessicants in HVAC. One possibility that intrigues me is their use in less humid climates over a complete year cycle: allow them to absorb water to dehumidify the air in summer, then heat them to release the water vapour in winter, to humidify the air. I used to work in an office here (Dublin) with an AC that worked OK in summer, but would dry the air out badly in winter. The relative humidity would drop as low as 20%, so people were feeling cold even though the temp was 25C (77F), and suffering problems with dry eyes and skin. The Irish HVAC people clearly didn't understand the need to control relative humidity at ~50%.

I've had less trouble with Calculus since I saw it applied to real-world concepts. The classic case is the relationship between Distance, Velocity, and Acceleration. You can view Integration and Differentiation as more "general" versions of multiplication and division that you can apply to functions rather than just numbers.

If you drive at a constant speed, you can multiply your speed by the time you travel to get the distance you travelled. But what if your speed is not constant? Say you draw your speed on a chart versus, it follows a mathematical curve? If you have the function that defines that curve, the distance travelled is the area under the curve between the start time and the end time. You can do various things with geometry to roughly work out the area numerically, but Integration is an analytical method you can use to get the exact distance, by "multiplying" the function by time to get another function for the distance.

The thing they didn't tell me about Calculus is just how much of it there is to remember. At university I felt I was being examined on how much of it I could remember, rather than my skill in using it. Pointless, since out in the real world you don't get penalised for consulting a reference of some kind, since it's all about results, not being a swot.