Though the flattening effect of telephoto must be taken into account. If you want to flatten the perspective, step back and zoom in, if you want the opposite, step in and zoom out. I find that 50mm is the shortest lens that's any good for people's faces, and 35mm is great for scenes. I have a 18-270 Tamron, which is fine when you want the zoom and quality isn't so important (photos are not as alive as those from even my original 18-55). Basically a couple of primes are great for those times when you want better quality and decent bokeh, whereas a travel lense (e.g. 18-270) is useful when you are going for a walk and don't want to have to change lens.

I have a bridge and, unless you really need the zoom, the picture quality is let down by the size of the sensor, resulting in much more noise than you get with SLRs or a high-end compact.

Not to mention that superzooms have tiny (1/2.33) sensors. This causes much noise in the images which precludes blowing them up to anywhere near the size that the megapixel count would have you think.

A straightforward mod would be to have a truecrypt volume concealed in the least significant eight bits of a long 24bit wav file that you could obtain as, e.g. a 1hour+ trance mix from beatport (that would be 16bit, so the data would be inaudible). Slowdown would be tolerable given modern hardware.

People say that about science vs religion, but going by the evidence thing, many areas of what is traditionally called science would be better described as religion. Even physics requires one to take certain foundational assumptions in faith before one can talk of interpreting evidence, and other areas of science are much more apt to preach the current popular theories as dogma and dismiss counterevidence. If only other areas of science were as rigorous as physics.

Next: Opera 3.1*10^8

Just shows you the progress in CPU power: ASCI Red was the first supercomputer to go over 1TFlop, and was massive, now we have this with just one chip!

In a written debate, the Gish Gallop shoe is on the other foot as there is too much published argument in the scientific literature to be effectively refuted in a debate, written or otherwise, regardless of how accurate a description it is of our reality.

On the subject of logic, you may want to look at some more recent work by e.g. Jeff Paris on deriving information from inconsistent knowledge: much has been done to get outside the straitjacket of classical logic, and you can find perfectly sensible ways of reasoning which don't obey the laws of classical logic.

On Dawkins: I've just finished reading chapter 4 of his God Delusion and struggle to understand how a highly rated scientist in his own area can be so naive about concepts of God and about what religious people may believe and how their religious worldview is structured. In short, it's an utterly unconvincing rant and I struggle to see how people can rationally see it as anything else.

You may find the Buddha's take on reality more compatible with your understanding: 'Long is the cycle of birth and death for those who don't know the Dharma'. The problem is that we don't understand the nature of our reality, our place within it and what we really are as part of that reality. It is from this lack of understanding that the perpetual 'hell' arises when we're locked in a box of unsatisfactoriness and can't get out.

The trouble with 'love' and a 'loving God' is that our modern Western notion of love isn't really the right one, nor is the common idea of what the word 'God' refers to, and from this comes a great deal of misunderstanding. The scriptures from ancient cultures such as the Hindu and Buddhist texts from ancient India and the Judeo-Christian texts represent an understanding which won't make sense in our Western world without an attempt to translate the wisdom from the context in which it was written to the context in which we now find ourselves. The presence of this gap is lost on a lot of commentators from either side of the science-religion divide.

Science in general is the systematic study of what can be deduced rationally from all available evidence about the reality we find ourselves in. But given evidence, we must make assumptions in order to interpret the evidence so that it has any meaning. For example, no one actually observed the universe 5 billion years ago, it merely appears that things existed that far back because there are good theories consistent with a large amount of evidence that explain the current world as the culmination of a few billion years of history.
When we find a fossil in a rock somewhere, our natural assumption is that it was always there, but there is no actual evidence that it existed before it was observed. I fondly recall Penn and Teller's chopping a man up illusion and the way that Teller was only present in the part of the apparatus being observed for the duration of the door being opened.

To stretch your mind a little, try to imagine a large 'matrix-like' self-generating world in a supercomputer which could produce the world around _you_ that _you_ experience, and bear in mind that you cannot verify that others' experience of what you think of as your reality is genuine: you have no memory past your early childhood, and so how do you eliminate the possibility that the universe you are in is very recent and that the past is, for the most part, an elaborate illusion?

Now, to practice scientific investigations in the present day, you have to buy into a worldview which contains a great number of fair, but ultimately untested and untestable assumptions about what happens in reality when you are not observing it, among other things. It is possible to think outside this worldview and if you take a mystical take on things, for example, you will choose to see the world outside of the scientific straitjacket. There is nothing wrong with this, so long as you are aware of your fundamental beliefs and accept that there are other ways of seeing things.

Caveat: this is not a statement of my belief, rather it is an attempt at a 'food for thought' exercise to stretch your understanding of your understanding of your reality. (That 'understanding' bit is no typo BTW.)

The problem is that there's no fish, and all the conjuring tricks in the world can change that, and can't fool the punters forever.

So what is a good *nix? BSD running on an EOL processor and architecture with a 25Mhz clock?

...that the Firefox boys and girls are getting into a 'quickest possible release' p***ing contest with themselves. There's no need for releases this often, twice a year, between the stable releases of Ubuntu is plenty fast enough.