A typical phone camera has an aperture of around f/1.8 to f/2.5. You care to tell me how you would get past the laws of physics to improve on this? I mean the lens is already nearly a ball to focus light on such a tiny dot. One could increase the sensor size but then the lens would need more physical separation to the sensor making the thickest component in a phone thicker still.

Software AF is simple contrast detection. Every phone I've used has the ability to select the subject to focus on, so why would this have any baring on depth of field.

Correct, however opening the aperture is a workaround to creating as similar an image as possible providing you haven't hit the limits.

I hear comments like this all the time. The reality is you've changed your FoV so you're now taking a completely different picture. If you want all other things staying as equal as possible, then to take the same photo on an APS-C camera as a Full Frame camera you'd need to switch to a narrower lens and step back from the subject. Oh your subject - camera - background ratio now changed, and so has your depth of field.

Or are you going to tell me all camera are equal because if you over expose your image by 100 stops you get a perfectly white frame on every camera?

Wow lets step back a bit. Though I guess someone called the automobile a fad at some point.
The battle for wider apertures dated back to post war. The 1950s was all about big lenses, wide apertures. I fondly recall using a Canon R mount 50mm f/1.2. Not a very sharp lens but provided incredibly narrow depth of field. Mind you it wasn't until the FE mount in the 80s they managed to get a 50mm f/0.95, something which Leica managed quite a lot earlier on their M series cameras in the 1960s.

Now that the history lesson is over, how about an art lesson. Depth of field is used to direct attention. If you want someone looking at a subject rather than the image on the whole you can isolate the subject by blurring the background. I did this on my holidays and I'm going to look back and think about what I looked like at the time who the hell cares where I was. If I wanted to take a photo of where I was I would do so. Now on the flip side, why the hell would you want to ruin a perfectly good photo of the Pantheon or some other wonderful place by standing in front of it? Why would you want to give up artistic control to some passer by telling them to look through the viewfinder and push the button.

You seem to know the technical details of how something is done, but not have a clue of why someone would do it. Go to your grandpa and ask him if he used wide apertures when he took photos. You'll likely find him don his oversize framed glasses and say "Kid, I was the master of bokeh before it was cool."

Fad indeed.

I would say it's worse than that. Changes such as this are actually pretty common. Actually I can't recall a single project I've been involved in where a contractor hasn't proposed some kind of design change. Contractors deal with what is possible and what is there. Engineers deal with what is theoretical and what is shown on drawings.

- Build a tunnel? Submerged rock that wasn't anticipated, contractor suggests slightly altering routes.
- Specify an exotic metal with a weird shape? Contractor says it can't be manufactured / transported to site within the timeframe, suggests slightly different design.
- Contractor builds anything at all which doesn't line up (which always happens), the contractor will ALWAYS suggest an alternative before accepting that they need to rip it out and start again.

The trick is ensuring you get the correct sign-offs in each case. In this case it looks like it was but the expertise wasn't here to recognise the problem. In the case of the Hyatt Regency Skywalk listed in this thread the sign-offs were not correct.

Yes. The giant Organic Farming lobby is making it illegal to use pesticides and herbicides. /eyeroll.

Let me be clear. GMO hasn't been linked to health effects. Yet..... :D I never argued that. I'm railing against stupid chemical usage instead of taking care of the land. Yes, some feeling is involved. I grew up on a farm.

And no, the farmer in the article did NOT use traditional methods. Tilling is traditional. He doesn't till. He plants a plethora of crop cover plants. He leaves his corn stalks to rot in the field. Basically, he's taking care of the land, and yes, sometimes he still uses chemicals... but it's FAR reduced. And he's doing better than his neighbors.

I read your study. Did you read the article at all, or did you just skim it? Or do you just not know anything about farming? I do. I grew up on a farm. I'm also NOT saying GMOs bad. I'm saying Stupid Farming Bad. I'm saying mass Pesticide and Herbicide use is lazy farming, and harmful to the soil and ecosystem.

I think you're assuming I'm a hippy. I think you're fighting a stereotype instead of what I'm saying.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/world/middleeast/syria.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/world/middleeast/syria.html?_r=0

"Syria’s ability to produce chemical weapons has been destroyed and its remaining toxic armaments secured, weapons inspectors said Thursday, as President Bashar al-Assad has offered unexpectedly robust cooperation".

Yes, I have evidence that this is true. That's because I listen to evidence before coming up with my opinion, instead of forming my opinion and then looking for evidence. That took me a 15 second google search to find. Should I look it up for Iran too? Nah. I'll let you do it. You need the practice. Also, there's a story ON SLASHDOT about Iran getting rid of their 20% uranium.

Ukraine? Sanctions are starting to have an effect. We'll see. Huh, weird, and just a few days ago, Russia and Ukraine signed a deal to let Crimea be it's own independant region... which it's always been anyway.

So, basically, you're wrong on every account, and a few minutes of googling would have told you that were you actually interested in the information and the context of the situation. I'd suggest not paying attention to mainstream news. They suck at context.

Oh, PLEASE tell us all how the Arab Spring was Obama's fault... And Fuck Israel.

Nobody takes us seriously because we started two wars over bad intelligence. No one takes us seriously because we talk about democracy and freedom and then invade countries that don't do what we say. Nobody takes us seriously because we've overthrown democratically elected governments. No one takes us seriously because we're a f'in joke.... We're a child with a giant stick running around hitting other children

It's weird, but plenty of countries are taken seriously without waving their military around. Japan's taken seriously, and they don't even have a military to speak of! We wield enough economic and cultural power that we shouldn't even have to use our military. And strangely enough, when we DO use diplomacy and sanctions, stuff gets done.

Of course they still have to neutralize the horizontal momentum, otherwise they crash into the ground with only a high horizontal speed instead of having a high vertical speed as well. All a separate landing pad saves them is the fuel required to fly back to the launch pad - but they'd then need a ship to carry the rocket from the sea-based landing pad, and then transfer it to some sort of overland vehicle capable of carrying a 200 foot long rocket massing over 500 tons. Considering everything I've heard is that flying it all the way back to the launch pad only adds a tiny percentage to the needed fuel, which itself is a tiny percentage of the cost of a launch, it seems like that's adding a whole lot of complexity for very questionable benefit, in fact I wouldn't be surprised if flying it back was actually cheaper than the alternative.

Quite so, and they mention just that in the article.

How does recycling beer-brewing waste as a cheap, nutritious animal feed instead of burying it in a landfill contribute to ocean acidification?

So, is NASA currently paying a nearly 3x premium to SpaceX just to get their technology off the ground or what? Not that I object to such long-term thinking, quite the opposite in fact, but I could swear the SpaceX contract was marketed as a cost-saving maneuver.

It says here that it currently costs $10,000 to get a pound of payload into orbit, but from TFA SpaceX has a $1.6 billion contract for 12 launches, and if the current ~5000 pound payload is typical that works out to ~$27,000 per pound. Granted, assuming SpaceX perfects the reusable F9 that stands to potentially reduce launch costs 5 to 20-fold, easily making it one of the cheapest options available, even assuming that the current contract strictly covers launch costs and profit and without any R&D budget. But it's hardly a cost-saving maneuver in the short term.

Also, gotta love the phrasing in the summary "In another win for the company, as the L.A. Times reports, SpaceX also has launched a re-supply mission to the ISS." As though completing the mission that's actually paying the bills was just an added bonus.

That weakling got Osama, has Iran giving up it's highly enriched Uranium to lift the sanctions, and cut a deal that got Syria to give up their chemical weapons. There are other measures of strength than blowing shit up. Diplomacy works.

Now, as a dirty lib, I do believe he is a weak president on the homefront. Dude hasn't even TRIED to fulfill his campaign promises and keeps trying to cut deals with the Republicans who clearly aren't going to give him squadoo even though he gives them 90% of what they wanted anyway. Sigh....

If you're going to hate on Obama, hate on him for real reasons. His foreign policy had strengthened us, not weakened us. Bush is the one that took us from having the whole world supporting us to having everyone revile us. Again....

I'm really weirded out by all the people who give accolades to Putin lately. Russia's a shithole man. It's an oligarchy, flat out. He's not standing up to anyone. Standing up would be helping people and NOT debt slaving them with the IMF. How is invading the Ukraine when it's down in any way brave or good?