"It's amazing what can be accomplished when we don't care who gets the credit." -(I forget who originally said this, ironically enough...) :)

It actually isn't traditional HDR (where multiple exposures are combined into one frame to create a final image with higher dynamic range.) What you're talking about is somehow gradually increasing the exposure to progressively let more light in as it gets darker as the sun sets. There's currently no magical way to achieve this, but there are a number of different techniques that people have implemented thus far including using light meters to watch the ambient light and either lengthen the shutter speed or gradually stop down the lens aperture, using multiple cameras to bracket different exposures and bounce between the cameras in post-processing, and so on.

You can read about these techniques in more detail at the very bottom of this tutorial under the header labeled Timelapse "Holy Grail"? Sunset, Sunrise, Day to Night Transitions.

A similar rule applies to amateur rally races in Finland, covered on the BBC show Top Gear. In folk racing, every car is given a nominal and equal value, such as €1000. At the end of a race, if anyone asks to buy your car then you have you sell it to them, which keeps anyone from putting too much into a car.

Android Market apps are mostly super cheap. Who can't afford $1 on a game they'll play for a few days non-stop? Or a few bucks on a ROM management app? Prices for most paid apps are so low that I imagine that the largest barrier to entry is not price, but the effort required to set up one or more credit cards. My hypothesis, for that reason, is that a large portion of the piracy comes from the age 15-20 crowd who have fancy phones and lots of free time to figure out piracy options, but no credit card(s).

Google can greatly reduce this kind of piracy by working out pricing deals with the carriers to allow charges to appear on phone bills. How else would the ringtone industry thrive as it has? Verizon certainly doesn't offer a direct-bill Android Market option. Maybe this is already the case on other carriers? How does piracy compare in those cases?

Another annoyance of the Market is currency conversion. I've bought apps for sale in both Yen and Euros, and for those purchases I had to set up a Visa card since my AMEX didn't support foreign purchases (on the Market, at least). Most users don't want to deal with that kind of crap ... again, piracy is easier. Can't Google Checkout handle currency conversion on the developer's end without hassling end-users?

This is true until they release a first-party game with the update included as a requirement. For example, Super Mario Galaxy 2 includes the 4.2 system update and requires you to update your system before you can play the game ... unless you start the game with a homebrew tool that blocks the update. Funny how the very feature they're trying to remove is capable of blocking the removal.

Homebrew users know to avoid system updates at all costs, so the only people affected by them are people who have not yet hacked their Wii. Once updated, though, those people will have a harder time installing homebrew should they choose to try it.

1) Lot's of software engineers do get paid by the hour, for similar reasons. It's not really always predictable work.

2) A lawyer has to deal with opposing counsel screwing up with his work. Usually software engineers don't have to deal with sentient beings in their computer adding bugs.

3) There is a huge difference in information accessibility. The information you need to know to, say, write a program is there and (relatively) easily accessible to you. The information you need to build a case may be in the minds and desks and file cabinets of someone who has every incentive to try to keep it from you. You may not have any idea until you get far into the discovery process how much a case will actually cost to litigate.

The law tries to be clear, but it never can be because it's fundamentally trying to encode all sorts of fuzzy human emotions/motivations/tendencies, etc.

Let's take your lawyer-free utopia. Rules are crystal clear and the process of checking whether a rule has been followed is straightforward and mechanical. How do you handle something like a fair use rule? A 30 second time limit? What if it's a 35 second clip that's on quietly in the background of an Indie movie? What if it's a 15 second clip of an advertisement lifted directly from a competing company's ad?

Look at laws that have crystal clear applications: statutory rape laws. Did they have sex? If yes, is she under 17? If yes, then guilty! No mind that it was her 18 year old boyfriend. How about drug possession? No need for judges to do the sentencing, we can simply make sentencing mechanical. 10 years for 10 grams, 100 years for 100 grams. No need to consider stuff like that the same amount of LSD can weigh a ton more when it's dissolved in sugar cubes rather than blotter paper.

The criminal justice system is one of those areas where lawyers and judges have been taken out of the loop, with 95% of cases being disposed of quickly through plea bargaining and sentencing being dictated by tables and formulas. It is also one of the most completely messed up, random, and downright unfair areas of the law.

I'll keep the suggestions flowing: I love last.fm for its ability to help me find (and listen to) new music. It even offers a dedicated client that doesn't require an open browser window all day.

MIT's strategy is very interesting. Several groups (like our team) have been forming their teams for weeks, but MIT appeared on the scene just today, and it's fascinating that they got a front-page Slashdot plug. I give them lots of credit for flooding the scene with mentions in such a short time. Whereas some teams give their winnings to charity (like ours), others entice balloon spotters with cash portions of the earnings, and MIT has decided to do a little of both.

DARPA is the sole decider of how difficult this competition will be. Will they place the balloons in dense urban areas, or will the launch them in small rural communities?

Best of luck to all the teams tomorrow, MIT included. I hope that the contest winner will write a paper describing their strategy, both in network-building and in launch-day data collection.

You can view the Google Public DNS privacy and logging policies here. (It's nice and relatively short. Very un-EULA-ish.)

From the page:

I believe it was the other way around. Amazon would slowly lower the price on items they saw you monitoring over time, hoping to entice you to finally buy it. One guy was complaining because he lost his cookies and thus his discount on the product he was wanting.

It looks like the standard account for fastmail.fm limits you to only 7 aliases. I use tuffmail which is a similar service but they give everyone with a paid account unlimited aliases. Another thing that looks worrisome with fastmail.fm is that there seem to be bandwidth and polling quotas.