The whole eugenics movement in the 50s

Basically, Myst was an adventure game -- wander around and solve puzzles. Only it had a much less satisfying user interface, and was terribly slow. Result -- boring game play. As I recall, and I didn't play it much (girlfriend was in love with it), the puzzles were rarely particularly visual, either. And the puzzles were often boring. It also had the problem of needing to spend endless boring hours clicking on everything to see what responded.

So -- kind of a pretty art gallery, could hold my attention for several minutes that way. Boring as a game.

Saw info on a book on this topic today, in fact: http://filesthatlast.com/about/ . Looks interesting so far.

Sorry, you're wrong. Gimp, which I have used at work for web work, doesn't have many of the basic capabilities I use heavily in Photoshop for photographic editing (I use Photoshop at home, legal copies, currently current at CS6).

Well...in absolutely literal terms, Gimp can of course do anything at all --- it can set any pixel of a canvas to any specified RGB color; thus in theory any 8-bit output you can imagine you can produce in Gimp.

However, this theoretical truth is irrelevant.

For any serious photo work, you need 16-bit-per-channel images. You don't need them really for the final result, but you need them for the original RAW conversion and the intermediate work. Back in the darkroom days, a print could hold about 5 stops of brightness range, a negative 10 -- and deciding how to map the one to the other was the essence of photo printing. If you can't represent the full camera file, you've been forced into a limited version of the work already.

Also, adjustment layers with layer masks are really really wonderful tools. It's like dodging and burning died and gone to heaven. You can do quick approximations, see if the approach will work, and refine them later. And maybe again when print samples show you were optimistic :-). (Adjustment layers are things like applying the curves tool as a layer to everything below it; you can go adjust that curve later without having to re-do anything else.)

Those are the particular areas I won't consider giving up. Other people may have others, also. Lots of professionals are much more committed to various plugins than I am; I've only really got three I can't live without, Noise Ninja and Color Mechanic and Focus Magic. And I could learn to do without Focus Magic.

No. PSP isn't even VAGUELY competitive with Photoshop, even for just the base task of preparing exhibition versions of photos. When you get into the more complex graphic design tasks it's even worse.

Unless...has PSP added adjustment layers for things like curves adjustments on 16-bit-per-channel data, with layer masks?

I don't open photoshop for simple stuff; when I *do*, I need the full toolbox.

I don't know who Gimp might look attractive to. It's missing two things that are absolute must-haves for me preparing images for high-quality printing (think "exhibition quality", not machine prints).

Specifically, support for 16-bit-per-channel images (as others have said, the final result can be reduced to 8-bit fairly safely; it's while you're working it that it needs the extra space), and support for adjustment layers with layer masks (also up through 16-bit). I will frequently end up with 4 separate curves adjustment layers with layer masks, plus a couple of content layers with unusual blending modes, for even a simple picture; a complex picture, or a restoration job, can easily go to twice that.

Also, there's the issue of integrated raw conversion in the workflow.

Beyond that, for professionals there are usually mandatory plugins, and if the Photoshop plugins don't run in Gimp (I don't know, I haven't checked that) and there isn't an equivalent plugin (there never is), it's hopeless. I need Noise Ninja and Focus Magic and Color Mechanic as my minimum; professionals need more (and usually need some of the high-end masking plugins).

However, the subscription model isn't that bad for professional users. Except for artists -- as usual, they get squeezed, because they tend to need the outer reaches of capabilities, and the vast majority of them have not nearly enough money. It's the serious amateur photographers who get hurt in this.

For me, trips have a large photographic component; often it's the primary purpose for the trip. So suggesting I not take my camera gear on a trip might as well be suggesting I don't *go* on the trip (which, admittedly, would be cheaper). And even if it's insured and the insurance doesn't find some way to not pay off, I've still lost the pictures in the camera, and probably several days (or even the rest of the trip) of photo opportunities (can't get instant insurance payout, in some locations can't buy a new camera locally). The laptop (and a good one, with enough disk and processor power and a good screen) is a necessary part of the photo kit too.

Then again, in my old world-traveling days (1958-1994, I guess), I guess I spent over 30 months outside North America, and never had anything stolen from me or anybody in my party. (Most of that time was in western Europe, but a couple of months were in Africa.) Of course, I wasn't carrying a laptop most of that time, and my early camera gear wasn't worth stealing. But later on I carried multiple SLRs and a big lens collection to the UK, Australia, and New Zealand for a total of several months; never lost anything. And my parents never lost gear on the early trips with them, either. Are things a LOT worse now?

I really don't care what tool is used in a homicide. Why do you?

The full nasty form of the proposed law bans possession, not sale, as I understand it. If so, then this doesn't "end-run" anything. It does of course make it easier for somebody wishing to possess illegal magazines (which would no longer refer to Hustler!) to do so.

I commented on Facebook a few months back that the work with 3D printers and firearms clearly marked the end of prohibition as any kind of rational, effective, approach to any firearms issues.

Well, yeah, saying some *group* is "all like" something-or-other is pretty much the definition of "bigoted". Most especially a group people are born into rather than self-selecting; at least MENSA people mostly *are* smart.

I definitely prefer to enjoy myself on vacation. Usually, I do that by taking pictures, which is one of the things I enjoy most, and often the reason I picked a particular place to go on vacation (the other is to see people I know who live there; I often take pictures of the people, too).

300 pictures in a day is off the bottom of the scale for me on vacation. I mean, I might have taken that many on film 20 years ago. Today it's more likely to see 3000 on an interesting vacation trip.

This also affects what backup schemes work on the road. Uploading 30 GB at 3G speeds (and plan limits) is generally not a winning strategy. Since tech gear is high-risk for theft, I really need to get the backup copies into something innocuous, or else into the cloud.

(If you don't enjoy taking pictures, by all means, don't, then!)

You're tilting at a straw windmill. The very first word of his subject line is "(NEAR)"; obviously he knows perfectly well he may not be able to reasonably achieve complete access.

On mass transit, I could read maybe. If not too crowded, maybe even get out a laptop and work, depending. While driving, the time is truly lost. Then again, I only drive 20 minutes or so to work. And often do errands on the way home, and sometimes during the day (at lunch or whatever).

Which? The documentation?

Since the alternative for me is Microsoft, whose documentation is voluminous but horrid, I actually find the Open Office documentation a reason to use it.