This is important. Current digital sensors are reflective & that results in a specular reflection. This greatly increases the flare, since much of the light the strikes the sensor reflect back into the lens, where it can reflect from a lens back to the sensor. This is one area where digital has been noticeably worse that film. See PhotoTechEDU Day 4: Contrast, MTF, Flare, and Noise @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNvFsOvVkOg&feature=channel. This is the major loss of contrast at low spacial frequency (eg ~ 10 lp/mm). The digital censors are not living up to the potential of the glass. This could really help. Now if I can just save up enough for a next generation Leica M10...

Fogel has presented some clear ideas. Many open source projects begin as benevolent dictatorships: Linus/Linux. van Rossum/Python. Theo/OpenBSD. Pollak/Liftweb. At least in this list, the operating systems went to group-based solutions. I would assume that this is due to the sheer effort of maintaining systems > 100 KLOC becomes overwhelming and leads to burn out.

When the Manhattan Project needed rare earths, they turned to Frank Spedding, a chemist at Iowa State. He managed to get the job done with a lot fewer resources that what is being discussed here. I fear that we Americans have become too lazy and in love with a quick return on the buck. Some things are hard work, even if you are really bright. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Spedding. He also created the Ames Laboratory, the one near Offit Air Force Base, not the Ames Research Center near the Navy's Moffitt Field.

i lived in France for a while. I was impressed that a doctor's office was just that. A doctor could set up an office with a waiting room and an examination room. I walked in, signed the bottom of the list and waited. When the doctor came out, he looked around for anyone on clear distress and then called the top person on the list. When it was your turn, you went in and got care. You then signed the doctor's daily log & gave your carte de sante. Not a single clerk or assistant. How is that for efficiency?

The doctors could even make house calls if you had a sick child. A wonderful system, and about half the cost of our monstrosity.

From TFA

Yes, but this is only true if N(eyeballs) = 2 million - N(one-eyed monkeys) - 2*N(zero-eyed monkeys). Of course, once we have humans and their eyeballs involved, we will need modify this recently discovered Microsoft monkey-eye theorem. We should inquire if Microsoft considers human and monkey eyes equivalent in order to determine the effective conversion factor between human and monkey eyes.

A Microsoft Creationist would set the conversion rate at infinite, since our eyes are in the image of God, and monkey eyes are not in God's image. I find this ironic, since God is invisible and therefore has no image.

A Microsoft geneticist might argue that the similarity in eyeballs is comparable to the similarity in the genetic code that encodes the eye. This might state the monkey eyes and human eyes have 90% of their genes in common. However, these genetic differences represent a vector in an N-dimensional space, where N is the number of genes required to express an eye. If we assume that human eyes are the reference, we can determine the 'gain' (presumably less than 1) of the monkey eyes of by finding 'eye-gain' vectors of the Monkey eyes. We can then use a standard inner product to determine the 'eye-gain' values for the various monkeys used in this "Microsoft Writes an OS with Monkeys at the Keyboards Experiment".

In either case, Microsoft will need a new Math to support this claim. When the blogging Microsofty proves this assertion mathematically, I will be only to happy to equate Microsoft with monkeys coding an operating system.

I have two daughters in college. One bought a Dell laptop and the other bought an MacBook. The MacBook as been flawless and the Dell is the biggest lemon I have ever seen. The motherboard, hard drive and graphics card were replaced under warranty. The replacement graphics card is starting to fail (leading to multiple reboots a day). At least compared to Dell, Apple products are reliable and easy to use. If you compare Apple laptops with similarly configured PCs, the Apples are cost competitive. So is works better and costs the same means 'status symbol', I'm all for it.

Free and Open Source SOFTWARE. Your going to need some serious heat to make Intel or ADM CPUs become soft. A synchrotron can puddle silicon pretty quickly, but who uses a CPU for a monochromator?

Look at meeting like Davos and other forums for 'movers and thinkers'. Nearly every presentation is on a MacBook Pro.

You also should be adding in payroll taxes. For lower income groups, these are more significant than income tax. So, a 'flat' income tax and a abolition of payroll taxes would be needed to have a 'flat' tax rate. Otherwise, it will lead to a disproportionate total tax rate on those least able to pay.

For a truly radical idea, every citizen not in prison gets a monthly stipend that is close to the poverty line. Couple that with a flat tax on all income, as the parent suggest. Now, you can abolish most forms of welfare and unemployment without causing true suffering. If you don't work, you live in poverty but you don't live on the street. There would be some special assistance for people who cannot function due to a mental illness, but the 'cure' for being poor is money.

If you think this would destroy the incentive to work, think again. There were experiments that measured this, and most people still want to work. Living in poverty sucks. My second comment is this: if some deadbeat would rather watch television all day so he can live in squalor, good riddance. Better he do that than go to work and be a deadbeat that slows everyone else down.

I agree. But the Supremes just interpret laws. If we want a change, we need to start an Amendment, something like a prohibition against granting personal liberties to corporations and prohibiting any entity that cannot vote from seeking redress from congress or from donating to a political campaign. I would be happy to grant enough money to run a campaign to any candidate that meets the requirements to get onto the ballot. It will be expensive, but not as expensive as living with a Congress that somebody else bought and paid for.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. All of the free market crowd should recognize that a free market is predicated upon all participants having enough information to make informed decisions. So access to information is critical for the market participants to know what they are consenting to in an agreement. All of the arguments from economists about market efficiency are based upon perfect information by all parties. This is clearly an idealization, but it underscores the need for widely accessed, shared information in the running of a free market. A free market is not a natural state of the economy, it is a highly refined construction based upon thousands of years of social evolution. Communication and access to information are essential infrastructure.

This is a ridiculous statement. There is no country that is best in everything, just like there is no athlete that is best at everything. The United States may excel at personal liberties, but the French are clearly better at Egality, and probably Fraternity. French healthcare is excellent - I had children born in the US and France, and I strongly prefer the French system. US doctors have offices that look like advertisements for drug companies and doctors offices are almost always centered around clerks that file insurance. French doctors have simpler offices with far fewer assistants, and those assistances are more likely to be medical staff than clerks. I want a medical system that spends money on medical, not bureaucracies. We in the use have a medical system that is collapsing under its own weight.

As to the Napoleonic Era, it is important to point out that they were the first European power to establish a Republic free of a Monarch. They were also trying to form democratic institutions on a continent dominated by Monarchs that wanted nothing more than to see France's attempt fail. We in the US were under the Articles of Confederation from November 1777 to June 21, 1788. Cornwall surrendered on October, 1781. So we had over six years to work on democratic institutions under relatively peaceful conditions. But the French fleet continued to combat the British in the West Indies. There was also the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780-1784) that was sparked by the American Revolution. All of this made the Treaty of Paris a rather complicated affair. But as a result of their rather expensive support of our revolution, the French government was under great financial hardship. This was one of the lead-ups to the French Revolution, which began on 14 July 1789 with the storming of the Bastille. By 1792, the French were in wars with Austria and Prussia at a time when their government and armies were disintegrating. By 9 November 1788, Napoleon had seized power.

So in our first decade, we gained significant allies and were able to deliberate on forming The Constitution, which is a truly remarkable document. In contrast, France's first decade faced powerful enemies, the Reign of Terror and the ascent of Napoleon. Relatively speaking, we had it easy.

Americans don't recognize the absolute genius of Napoleon. In addition to being one of the finest military commanders in history, he also established the Napoleonic Code. Frankly, the Napoleonic Code is a far more rational basis for a legal system than British Common Law. He also advanced the fledgling École Polytechnique, which is still one of the finest technical universities in the world - certainly a peer of MIT or CalTech. He also advanced their banking system and post office.

I do not state that I would rather be French than American, but calling someone an 'ignorant, America-hating asshole that seems to be so pissed off because the US makes the rules for world' is just stupid. Learn about the rest of the world. Take what is best and synthesis something even better. We can use the French model to evolve and the French can use the American model to evolve.

I read

So the French Military do not seem to have this access to the source code that you are talking about. Do you have first hand knowledge of Microsoft sharing Outlook code with governments and allowing them to build modified versions?

as in, "The web developer screamed 'IEEEEEEE!' as he lept to his death in frustration." This is known as an injection attack and is becoming increasingly common.

How is this modded interesting? WAAAAAA I hate taxes. The response is 'interesting'? Why not just say 'grow up and be part of society'? Do you want to get rid of scientific research? Has that not been as valuable at the free market in increasing our standard of living? Communists with science are more effective than capitalists without. Perhaps we should do without public health services or sanitation? I would rather pay taxes that endure Hobson's 'nasty, brutish and short' life before there were modern sewers or modern medicine. Perhaps we can forget the police, if you want protection, lets just rely on rent-a-cops or organized crime. Maybe we should get rid of paved roads? Public schools can be private: Why do I care if my co-workers can do basic arithmetic? I think that I can be more effective in a society where I can count on others being educated. I don't need the fire department at least 99% of the time, should I be willing to cut that 99% percent of the time?