California's problem is not that it is giving too much away to the federal government.

California's problem is that it is so horribly, impossibly mismanaged that it makes the Feds look as well-run as the government of Iceland. "Washington" is a fairly dirty word. "Sacramento" is an even dirtier word than that.

The BIGGEST problem in California?

Proposition 13. The idiots voted to not really pay property taxes anymore, and so state revenues are thoroughly dependent on sales tax; and guess what happens to sales tax when the economy tanks and everybody stops buying anything?

And, of course, outside the Wal-Mart in Orange right before I fled the state before it could destroy me, there's a guy marching around with a poster talking about how Californians pay too much property tax...

Some say you get the government you deserve...

Does the quoted author mean the 1998 Nairobi embassy bombing?

Or is he just so meta he doesn't even need to get the date right?

Not true. Most "HDR" images that you see online are people doing exactly what they did in the 1800s: taking three different exposures, separated by time. Almost any HDR landscape shot you'll see is done this way, with a completely stock camera that no one would call an "HDR camera". What is novel in this design (although they are far from the only people in the world trying to make this work) is that it separates the exposures in space, through use of a prism and multiple cameras, rather than in time. It is STILL the same thing; the superposition of different exposures of the same subject on top of each other, which is all that HDR "implies". The only difference is the method of acquiring separate exposures.

Don't be absurd.

Even these "HDR" images are nowhere near outdoing the human eye in terms of dynamic range (and I'm talking instant dynamic range, not the way your eyes gradually adjust to bright or dark environments). The eye can see, depending on who you ask, 17-19 stops of dynamic range in a STATIC scene; again, that's not considering the eye's adapability, which puts the total "adaptive" dynamic range up close to 20 stops. The best cinematographic films get close to 15 stops of dynamic range, this terrible-looking digital "HDR" is around 12 and is then compressed to 6 or 7 on your monitor, making it look completely flat and washed-out, and most digital still cameras can hit 9 stops of dynamic range.

"Tone-mapping" is, literally, a synonym for compression. That is all it is. It is compression of a 12-stop range onto a 5-stop computer monitor. This is why it looks like crap.

Your claim that HDR is currently limited by the eye itself, and not by display technology, is completely wrong. Even the best displays out there can do MAYBE eight stops, and these are $10,000 EIZOs. Your $200 Samsung is lucky to get six stops.

There is not a display format on the planet that can outrange the human eye.

Getting into aesthetics now, it seems apparent to me that except for scientific and technical imaging, higher contrast is almost always more desirable than greater dynamic range. Film has fifteen stops of latitude; the best cinematographers in the world are generally using only about seven of those stops, i.e. they are stretching the dynamic range of the scene rather than compressing it, to enhance contrast, and when they do use all fifteen stops of range they do that because they have access to the best display technology in the world–film projectors, which can project the same 15 stops of latitude.

HDR gets rid of contrast entirely by compressing the range, and that is why movies–almost entirely still shot on film–look 100 times better than this gray, ghosty tech demo.

Which is exactly what this camera(s) does...splices together images taken at several different exposures. Things have changed a lot in 150 years!

I swear, all these government-conspiracy/takeover/whatever folks must never have been to the DMV in their lives...

Is it the same government I see, the one that is completely incapable of winning wars, balancing budgets, reforming social security, reforming health care, building proper infrastructure, saving the economy, upholding its own constitution, or of doing even the most basic paperwork properly, that is also supposedly the executor of countless nefarious schemes for total domination that, despite constituting the most perfect and massive conspiracy in the history of the world, leave no trace whatsoever of their existence?

Unless the DMV is just a cover operation run badly ON PURPOSE to convince everyone how incompetent they are!!!

Oh man.

They're good.

The short answer is that, yes, your life and the life of your military comrades-in-arms IS worth less than hers.

That is a tough choice emotionally, but rationally it is actually not a tough choice. You (in the given example) are a soldier. Your job is not just to kill; your job is also to die, if absolutely necessary. If the choice is between a soldier dying and a civilian dying, the soldier should die. He's a soldier. That's his job. He puts himself in harm's way so that others may be protected from harm; this is entirely the definition of a soldier in a modern society, and is the reason their service is heroic. In the case of Afghanistan, those others are the Afghan people (whatever "Afghan people" means in a country which is mostly a bunch of different tribes warring with each other, but that's another issue). Sacrificing the lives of civilians in order to protect soldiers may make sense to a Captain on the ground, and it may well be the only realistic way to win a war, but it is NOT morally justifiable.

To head off any accusations, I don't believe this means I am cheapening the life of the soldier or suggesting his life be thrown away for nothing. I am suggesting exactly the opposite. His life is enormously valuable precisely because he is sometimes asked to sacrifice it. His duty is: to die, if necessary, so that others may live. His duty is NOT: to die, in the worst case, but also sometimes to live at the expense of noncombatants.

Military thinking since the First World War has, to varying degree, suggested that killing civilians of an adversary is preferable to losing your own soldiers. World War Two saw this whole-scale with the leveling of entire cities with various methods. The number of American lives that would be lost in an invasion of Japan was seen as justification for the use of atomic weapons against Japanese civilians (as well as justification for the conventional bombing of population centers throughout the war). This was considered acceptable at the time (and makes sense, in the context of that war), but I do not think it carries moral weight. The life of a soldier is to be taken before the life of a civilian, period. That's the whole point. That is what distinguishes OUR army, the army of a (at its best, which is by no means all the time) rational, democratic society, from the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and some Iraqi insurgent groups, which are fielded by pathological leaders completely willing, and in many cases desiring, to sacrifice the lives of civilians.

This is the only moral basis for the use of force by a democratic society, and while obviously idealistic, the closer we get to that ideal the more moral authority we will be able to assert to having.

If an airstrike will save the lives of some number of American soldiers, but there is reasonable suspicion that the same airstrike could kill some number of civilians (as there very often will be, in the chaos of Afghanistan), it seems to me entirely obvious that there should be no airstrike. It is not morally justified.

Will more soldiers die?

Yes.

Will more civilians live?

Yes.

It's as simple as that.

The American military is as powerful as it is despite its relatively small size mostly because of air power. We should reign in the air power to a point where it is almost never employed in the defense of American soldiers, IF that deployment will kill ANY civilians, whether those civilians are American citizens, foreign citizens, anyone. This would mean a much larger Army and a much smaller Air Force. That is the way it should be.

Smart munitions are great. That is an enormous step in the right direction. But they are still used with less than 100% certainty on the nature of the target. In the leaked documents that are the subject of this thread, a smart munition is employed on an abandoned fuel truck with little to no attempt to verify that the persons around the fuel truck are actually Taliban fighters. That is completely unacceptable. There is no excuse for it, period, and those involved should be removed of their duty. There were not any soldiers in direct and imminent danger from the people around the fuel truck, and even if there WERE, say, some Americans down the road who might have been about to be ambushed, the mere possibility of killing one hundred civilians by mistake should have been enough to stay the trigger.

In another prominent event leaked by WikiLeaks, an Apache attacks and kills five or six men who, whether they are armed are not, are not actively firing at anyone, American or otherwise. If they had been hostile insurgents (which they, pretty obviously in hindsight, were not), the situations were such that they may have been able to attack nearby American soldiers. EVEN THEN they still should not have been fired upon until it was certain who they were AND that attacking them would not kill civilians. In simplified and more basic terms, they have to pull the trigger first. That will mean more American soldiers will die; it also means more civilians will live. The moral imperative there is obvious.

Wars fought with such a philosophy would mean much bloodier wars for our side. This means we should be even more careful in the decision to apply force, that "establishing democracy" or "providing freedom" for or to a given people is taken very, very seriously, because we are not just asking our soldiers to kill for the liberty of others; we are asking them to, sometimes, and quite literally, die instead of others, some if not all of whom are not even American citizens, in order to secure their liberty. American air power has fooled us into thinking that wars can be won with little to no loss of life, which is not true; they can be won by air power with little to no loss of AMERICAN lives. Yes, civilian death tolls are much lower today than they were in wars of the past. They are still not low enough. If there is no way to ensure the safety of BOTH the American soldiers and the local civilians of a given engagement, American soldiers SHOULD die before civilians die.

Is this difficult? Yes. Does it require even more bravery from those already brave soldiers we ask to do our warfighting? Yes. Is it the only morally defensible means by which a rational society can conduct a war? Yes.

Unfortunately, both of those movies were absolutely terrible, so terrible that you were paying attention to the 3D soot blowing through the air, instead of the movie.

I'm going to start off with the full disclosure, too. I am currently a working 1st Assistant Cameraman, and I have worked on both "standard" (i.e. 2D) feature films and two feature films shot stereoscopically.

Your claim that working with 3D isn't that much trouble obviously has a bit of a skewed perspective; in your air-conditioned office chair in the editing suite, yes, all you have to do is be smarter with your metadata. On an actual set, the sheer size, weight, and complexity of these 3D camera rigs means that a lot of things directors enjoy being able to do, especially shooting handheld and moving quickly, you can't do anymore. Obviously it depends on the setup you're using but some of these 3D rigs literally cannot fit through a door; to get them inside a room (for location shooting) you have to take them apart, carry the parts into the room, and then build the thing again. Forget about moving very quickly, so-called "run and gun" shooting, or really most handheld stuff at all. Yes, we all saw the photographs of Jim Cameron holding the 3D camera on his shoulder while shooting Avatar. What you didn't see was the 300-pound key grip he threw it at the second the stills photographer was done. These things are MONSTERS and there is already enough waiting around and wrangling of gear going on on a film set; you want to move AWAY from gear that hinders you, rather than towards it. I can see why a director would be VERY unhappy with losing these capabilities.

Now, the first Technicolor cameras were ALSO monsters. Absolute beasts. Three cameras in one, basically, and since it was the 50s they were basically made out of cast iron and weighed about six tons (it probably felt like it, anyway). I won't argue that Technicolor was useless because the cameras were too big (especially since ALL cameras back then were enormous, but that's not the point). But I'm going to have to argue with you on your comparisons, as well. Technicolor was worth it. 2D to 3D is NOT the same as black and white to color; color is how we see the world. It makes sense for movies to be shot in color (it also makes sense for them to still be shot in black and white, if it will make the movie more effective). A 2D image, however, does not look inherently "flat", as a black and white image looks inherently colorless; the eye and the brain are more than capable of inferring three-dimensional spatial perception from a 2D image, especially if the director of photography likes depth of field. Stereoscopic depth is far from the only cue our brain uses to build perception of spaces; walk around with one eye closed and things might look a little less "three dimensional", but they certainly don't look flat and you're still quite capable of distinguishing relative distances between objects, because the brain also uses things like relative size, focus, light and shadow, movement parallax, etc. The 3D in movies does not, to my eye anyway, make the movies look more REAL; it makes them look more 3D. 2D movies look much closer to the way that I see the world than a 3D movie does, because I don't (and I doubt you do, either) see a 2D image as flat; I am able to infer all kinds of depth cues from things going on in the 2D image. Adding 3D to a 2D screen exaggerates all of those cues so much that things start to feel sort of grotesque; objects seem distended and loom out much closer to you than they should. It doesn't look real at all. It looks fake and made up, and for a lot of aesthetically-minded people, like directors, or directors of photography, the fakeness of it detracts from the experience much more than it adds.

Perhaps someone will shoot a masterpiece with very very subtle stereoscopic 3D effects; they key to the thing, I think, is subtlety, enhancing and enriching the depth cues that are already there, not blasting them away with a huge monster jumping out of the screen. That's cool, yeah, but it takes you OUT of the movie, it reminds you that you're in a movie theatre looking at a screen by sheer fact of trying to escape that screen that you are looking at. It's a hammer over the head. But the kinds of productions with the budget to shoot on 3D probably don't care much for subtlety (Avatar much?). So it will be a long, long time before we start seeing serious, aesthetically-minded directors embracing 3D. Steven Soderbergh will probably be the first; but then, he hasn't made a good movie in what, fifteen years?

When Terrence Malick shoots a film on 3D, then it's a real medium, and not just a gimmick. :)

Just to get the flame war started, I agree with the above. The movie was very cool and was great to watch, it was a lot of fun.

But come on. The basic premise wasn't even capitalized on. Dreams are WEIRD. Dreams are crazy things where ANYTHING can happen. Dreams are absurd, as in Kierkegaard. There were so many precise rules to the way the whole thing worked it wasn't a dream, it was an alternate reality slightly different than ours, but a reality with real laws and rules governing it. Dreams don't have rules. In a dream I can walk down the street and then Paris flips over and then I'm also an egg salad sandwich who kills Hitler with a goose.

The thing with the time dilation was the most absurd. I mean, never mind that just because you have a dream within a dream doesn't mean you have a brain within a brain (which would be kind of necessary to be thinking at, whatever, 1000x normal speed), but really? That's the only way the writers could think up to inject some sense of urgency? He'll be down there for...TEN YEARS! Oh man. What a drag. Should've set the alarm a half hour early today.

All of this is forgiven if the ENTIRE THING (including all the shared dream, machine-doohickey Architect stuff - how does she actually go about building these dream worlds? We only ever see her making cardboard models. Hmm...) is a dream, but then...

Kind of a boring dream.

Egg salad sandwich, man.

Whoever wrote this does not know anything about IMAX. IMAX is not projected digitally, let alone with a 2K digital projector.

35mm film is about equal, or a little better than, 4K digital in terms of resolution. Most all of the time when you go see a movie these days, it is still being projected on 35mm film. It's cheaper than a digital projector and looks better. When you went and saw Avatar in 3D it was being projected in 2K (for almost everyone) digital and that's why you could see the pixels on the screen. 2K is NOT good enough for anything but very small movie screens. Anyone who says it is is not a cinematographer (I am) and has never used both a 35mm film camera and the best digital cinema cameras (I have), and probably doesn't know what a cinematographer even really is. 99% of all big-budget films are still shot on 35mm film because it is simply the third-best image-capturing method out there, better than ANY digital camera in existence today. It is also much more expensive, but on large films the price of film is a drop in the bucket compared to everything else.

The second best cinema image-capturing method out there is 65/70mm film.

The best is IMAX.

IMAX is 65/70mm film travelling through the camera horizontally; each frame is about 2.75 by 2 inches. That is enormous. It's like a medium-format still camera...except 24 times a second. Here's a comparison of IMAX to regular 35mm film (most digital cinema cameras have sensors, by the way, about exactly the same size as a 35mm film camera): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Imaxcomparison.png

IMAX is NOT projected on 2K. "Digital IMAX" is. Digital IMAX is pretty much useless and is not even as good as standard 35mm film projection; it uses two 2K projectors overlapping each other to give a slightly higher than 2K theoretical resolution to the image; for those of you with still cameras, 2K is about equal in resolution to a 6- or 7-megapixel camera. Congratulations. Your $1000 SLR has way more resolution than a digital cinema projector that costs a half million dollars.

Real IMAX, i.e. horizontal 65/70mm film, has an estimated resolution of about 104 million pixels; you would need a 12K x 9K digital sensor to even come close to the resolution of IMAX. No one makes those and no one will for a long time, if ever. The highest-resolution digital photographic sensors outside of the military are probably Hasselblad digital medium format backs; they are about 60 megapixels, or half the resolution of IMAX film, and they are still cameras capable of only about one frame a second.

IMAX is not 2K. Digital IMAX is not IMAX.

IMAX is film. Film is incredible.