I might have to give that a try some time.

I keep getting the extended vehicle warranty ones or the "free trip from Marriott" ones. If I am at work I answer them and string them along or inform them of the illegality of their actions. For the car warranty ones I keep trying to get an extended warranty for a 1916 Stanly steam car roadster or 2016 Koenigsegg Regera. When fucking with them with the Stanly for year, I respond 16, they ask for make and model I respond with Stanly and roadster and it usually takes them a few minutes to figure out that I don't mean 2016 and then they get all pissed off but I keep demanding a warranty for one. With a Koenigsegg they usually can't figure out what I am saying and ask me to repeat it. For the free trip ones I politely inform them that interstate wire fraud is a felony and that I suggest that they report their employer to the FBI before they are also named as a co-conspirator.

I would also add that it is now completely free for everyone in the US to have your credit reports frozen.

Unless you are very close to the subject the perspective change won't be much given how far apart the sensors would be. Perspective changes really become an issue if doing very close photography, especially macro where you also run into things like focus breathing when doing focus stacking. If you are at least several feet away from the subject the perspective change shouldn't be a big issue and at larger distances becomes pointless. It may introduce some additional softness in high detail areas but with all of the other issues around image quality, tiny sensors, small pixel pitches and diffraction limits of ideal lenses it likely won't make that much of a difference. I do wonder if the perspective errors at distances of 2-3 meters would be more than the chromatic aberrations and diffraction of those little 3-4 mm lenses though. It looks like human vision can detect parallax differences down to about 30 arc seconds which seems like a good value to use since our eyes are farther apart than these tiny cellphone cameras so it would be a gross over estimate of the parallax they would experience. As most cell phone lenses are around a 28mm full frame equivalent that means they provide about a 70 degree field of view. So 70 degrees times 60 arc minutes per degree times 2 (30 arc seconds) gives us 8400 30 arc second units. This means to fully resolve parallax differences that people can see we would need to have a 70.5 mega pixel camera with a non diffraction limited 28mm lens in front of it. However a 28mm equivalent lens in front of a modern cellphone sized sensor really means the camera has about 4000 1 arc minute wide pixels. So if you don't notice parallax effects with your eyes your cellphone's quad cameras really won't.

In looking at the resolving power of lenses most cellphones unless they have a very wide open lens, think f/1.2, they are diffraction limited. Take the iPhone's 10XS's f/1.8 lens and 12 MP sensor. Under ideal circumstances the airy disc produced by a point source of light (2.4um diameter) will cover just under a 2x2 grid of pixels (pixel pitch of 1.4 um) for it's "normal" lens, and the f/2.4 "telephoto" lens would produce an airy disc that covers about a 3x3 grid of pixels under ideal circumstances. So using this we can see that diffraction has an effect about 3 to 4 times as greater, affecting 1.5 to 2 arc minutes, than the minimum human eye noticeable parallax would on image sharpness. Also very wide lenses like these tend to be on the soft side of things which only further degrades the resolving power. Here we have only been looking at image sharpness which is different from noise but still affects overall image quality.

On the noise front you won't see an exact halving of the noise but it will be very close. Even under ideal circumstances where one has a uniform colored uniformly illuminated shot the noise reduction would be less than half but is close enough to say so. This is because there will be systematic noise that is introduced into the system in addition to the truly random noise from the flow of photons to the sensor. The random noise will be halved but the noise introduced by the AtoD conversion, the signal amps, and a non uniform ideal sensor will still be present. If one wants to, it is possible to subtract out a fair amount of this systematic noise. Doing so requires dark and bias frames to be taken and is common practice in astrophotography.

Computational photography while interesting isn't the panacea that people think it is. The most useful aspects of it are the concepts of super resolution, ability for noise reduction, and increased dynamic range. For super resolution it can provide benefits provided that you aren't already diffraction limited which most cellphone are and by a fair amount too. For dynamic range and noise reduction it will provide some clear benefits but for noise reduction you are dealing with the inverse square law so using the 4 back facing sensors you would halve the noise. With dynamic range you might see the greatest benefit being able to do bracketing of shots at the same time to avoid motion artifacts and alignment issues. Of course those all assume that all the sensors have the same lens in front of them as the benefits decrease if one needs to do additional processing to scale different focal lengths. Some of the other benefits like the simulated bokeh are really hit or miss and really only seem to work under ideal circumstances. Even the camera you pointed to is kind of a mixed bag of results but I will say it does produce better results than a cellphone.

I've dabbled a fair amount with computational photography and for some things it works wonders, but for others it is just a hot mess. Personally I use it mostly for macro focus stacking, noise reduction, extremely long exposure simulation, gigapixel panoramas, and astrophotography as that is where it seems to do the best. How ever much smarts are put into these cameras it won't solve the unending stream of shitty pictures I see from people because technology won't make that poorly framed non level shot people took with awkward lighting of that poorly chosen subject a good picture. Then again most people will never be able to out shoot their cellphone even if given a better camera so what difference will it really make.

That doesn't go far enough and would still be gamed. What should be required is that H-1B workers should be the highest paid person at the company they work for or are doing work for, to preventing gaming of the system. I say this because we are always told how critical these people are and that there just aren't any Americans who can do these jobs. So if these people really are as exceptional and critical as claimed then it reasons that they should be the highest compensated individuals at a company.

I thought they were the only things he made that didn't suck and his fans were the only things he made that didn't blow.

That is true but I would say it goes farther than that. Most people are bad with money in general. A few years back I bought a lake property from a friend's parents. When I got it a number of friends asked how much I was paying a month for it and they were shocked when I told them I paid cash for it. I had been putting money away for several years specifically so I could get a property like this and one just happened to fall into my lap. Same thing with vehicles, I buy a nice used vehicles and drive them till they no longer run usually after they have over a quarter million miles on them. Yet all of my friends drive new vehicles and replace them every 5 years with another new vehicle each time spending more than I have on all vehicles I have ever owned combined.

The secret to being rich is living below your means. Now that the house is paid off (14 years early) the wife and I are saving well over 50% of our income. This has the added benefit that when something unexpected happens, like the old AC unit shits its self like it did this summer, we can just pay for it out of pocked with ease.

For ETFs 1% is stupid high as there are good ones with an expense ratio of 0.03% yes that is .03 percent and not a typo. There are plenty of good options that come in under 0.1% look at the SPDR family of funds that do a really good job of tracking the market and are dirt cheap.

At that point they shouldn't of had the bulk of their money in the stock market. They should have some but not most and the transition out of the market should have been done gradually in the good years between 99 and 07. I'm many years away from retirement so the vast majority of my money is sitting in the market and when things are on the way down is time to keep buying especially broad based ETFs that track the market wonderfully. In 15 years I will probably start the slow process of gradually moving it out into more secure investments. This does remind me that I should probably go and do a rebalance on things as it has been at least 6 months.

Had that happen to me once, but it wasn't a bad ad but a bad search result. Was looking for how to solve some SQL Server issue clicked on a link that looked like it had relevant info, but nope, porn site. My boss was behind me and saw it and asked what I was doing. I explained to her the problem I was working on showed the search result page with the relevant search result I clicked on and then showed that it went to the porn site instead. Thankfully it was at a small company so there was not a HR battle to be had.

Well we better build our own strategic maple syrup reserve to match theirs.

It was allowing girls in the ranks that finally got the Mormon church to drop its support of the BSA. There have been a rather large number of leaders who didn't agree with their stances and we have been long pushing to allow girls in and have a much more open view on things. A great example is the pack my kids are part of, there have always been girls at the meetings and what not for at least the past 12 years (the longest living memory in the pack). They participate in all the activities and we even handed out the award we were allowed to to them. We do all sorts of things mostly to expose the kids to different things they otherwise wouldn't have been. Apart from the winter sledding and summer water park events we always try to have them learn something from each activity with some being clearly more academic but we mostly try to hide it. With the 4th graders I bring a bunch of cameras and teach them about photography and how to take pictures that suck less.

I never said it was good, only that others existed. I've had to sit through it twice now and agree that it is painful.

Other non google versions exist. I know that the Boy Scouts has a program for this through a partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. It is also requirement at least at that cub scout level. I also know that my kids public school district uses the Scouts's program in their elementary school as it is available for anyone to use.