Herbert Hoover is largely considered an embarrassment these days, because his response to a depression was to try to reduce spending. These days, economists (you know, the people who study economic functioning in order to try and learn) -- economists understand that when some whack-ass Republican president crashes your economy, you've got to spend money to get yourself out of it.
In a way, though, such a crisis and the deficit-spending that it demands provides an opportunity, because as long as there's still a drop of money to be squeezed out of failing or counter-productive technologies, Corporations and their Republican Toadies will not want to rock the boat. But once the boat is already rocked, there's more willingness to invest in industries that have a chance of producing things of value in the deeper biological sense (which I would argue underlies any economy), strengthening the economy in the longer-term. We're talking new technologies like solar power, smart grids, etc, as well as basic R&D, not to mention developing a functional health care system, and getting a muzzle onto rabid investment houses and insurance companies. Luckily for the CaRTs, sucking money out of the economy can protect you from renovators.

Maybe you could just guess what the GPS log would have contained ...

The negative result could just as well imply that very few civilizations survive long enough to develop space travel. Whether that is because space travel is hard, or because survival is hard, is left as an exercise for the reader. Two useful data-points: (1) Human population has roughly doubled in the past half-century. (2) The excrement level has risen high enough to change the climate. Maybe it's like that on all planets where life evolves. Otherwise, wouldn't there be ... Meanwhile, it also seems likely that life elsewhere evolves in competition. One indicator of intelligence in such a universe might be *not* sending beacons out to places where you don't know what might be listening. Listen first, then talk. Maybe others see it that way, too.

Who said anything about business? There are other measures of success. One worthy goal to have for a new idea is to put it out a seminal paper that stimulates further research. Marketing and advertising would be totally irrelevant. Another idea is to develop a proof-of-concept, or to model a process in simulation. Again, no need for business types, who tend to f*ck things up by being plugged into existing markets, and short-term goals. Get an NDA. Find some friends you can trust who are subject matter experts. Comb through posted grants and CFPs.

The current competition is the Kindle, which is currently selling for $360. An open source tablet with a 12-inch screen that can display PDFs already sounds better, to me, even if it costs more than the kindle. The only problem (and it's a big one) is the convenient Amazon access to books and papers. Haven't bought a Kindle, yet, because it's just too small, and has (what seems to me to be) a crappy interface. One of these babies, though, yeah, I could do that. Just get me some wireless access to books and papers.

> We are seeing more and more about high dynamic range (HDR) images,
> where the photographer brackets the exposures and then combines
> the images to increase the dynamic range of the photo.

So instead of an image that goes from black to white, you have an image
that goes from dark grey to light grey. Now you can see all the stuff
that would've been hard to make out in a single photo. I think what has
happened is that you've *decreased* the dynamic range in the photo (or,
more properly speaking, you've used the fixed range better).

If a new camera provides pixels in the range [0,10] instead of the range
[0,1] you can still have the same problem. It's where you map the values
that come through the lens that makes the photo ledgible or not.

Or maybe I'm missing something.