Has There Been a Nuclear Incident in the Arctic?

The "shallow DOF" can be achieved with a longer lens on a crop-factor camera. And most landscape pictures (such as those) use the hyperfocal distance anyway.

A "expensive full frame" camera will have better "low noise" but marginally so compared to a APS C or even 4/3rds camera with the latest (4-5 years) generation of sensors. We're simply above the point of having new cameras really give anything beyond marginal returns in ISO utility (not because they don't get better ISO, but because so much sensitivity is useless for most kinds of photography, including most of landscape work (plus, it affects color rendition). In any case, in all the history of film photography, all known celebrated photographs seldom straiyed outside something like 800-1600 ISO. Not sure why we need 6400+ today, except for pissing contents and/or stalking).

Now, while most of the points are real, they are all marginal returns, and depend so much upon the conditions at the shoot and the skill of the photographer that they might as well not matter at all.

I'd go as far as to say that a $300 APS-C used well will be able to take just as good photos as any $5K full frame (yeah, it might lose a couple of stops of DOF, just use a faster lens on it), and even an expensive lens on the latter wont make that much of a different at any normal print size (at least up to A3).

Take a Canon SX60, having a lens that's 21-1365mm (sic) 35 mm equivalent. Admittedly the sensor is much worse, etc., but this covers most of that 6 lens range (apart from wide apertures at high tele).

That's one of the big advantages of Micro Four-Thirds - if you're willing to sacrifice a bit of sensor area, you get very bright and lightweight telephoto lenses.

http://www.irsn.fr/EN/newsroom/News/Pages/20170213_Detection...

Go and read the Pulitzer prize winning journalism that has come out in the last two years. I would be shocked if you could walk away saying it is hype. Or even look at another story from the last few weeks, Michael Flynn's pre-election sanction discussions with the Russian Ambassador and subsequent firing. People might have different opinions on the issue or different feelings on the way the information was leaked, but it can't be argued that it was a serious story of national importance. Meat loaf isn't the only thing out there.

Your criticisms of some media practices are valid and have been made many times before. They will and should be made again. But finding a bad article and saying "see the media is terrible don't trust them" is not the answer. If you see an article that seems silly, look at other sources to find one that's not. If you see an article that seems biased, read about the story from several other sources to get the full picture. Or even better, do that even if you don't think the initial source seems biased. Become a savvy news consumer who stays outside of ideological bubbles by purposely popping them.

And I will also say this... when something important is under attack, it is possible to try and save it even if you have concerns about certain aspects of how it functions. It's hard to prune weeds from a garden that has been burned to the ground.

I agree with you on this point, but I'd like to add that this argument can be spun further: the media framework is as rigged for views as it is due to poor prioritization of the media consumers.

Of course, next step in the chain is that it's the media companies that failed to find business models that adapted to digital and retained sufficient journalistic integrity. But I think that's a bit unfair. None of us have figured that out. I highly doubt that journalists are celebrating the new age of clickbait. I'd rather suspect they cry themselves to sleep over it, so it's not for lack of trying.

Sigh. I think I'm going to buy a Guardian subscription now.

http://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/206

These criticisms toward the media and 'it's not like it used to be' allegations have been going on for generations.

Are you sure you're not falling into the trap of "I didn't see it, so it doesn't exist"?

Every reputable news organization follows the journalistic code of ethics that puts institutional barriers in the way to counteract bias. Reputable outlets require multiple sources to corroborate stories before they go to print. They require printed or verbal disclaimers on any story that could pose a conflict of interest for the outlet or author. They require prompt retractions to be printed if an initial story is found to be factually inaccurate in any way.

It's not a perfect system. No system is. Bad articles can still slip through. Some organizations can adhere to it more than others. But it is way better than anything else humans have come up with to keep the news honest. Most journalists take their roles as arbiters of information very seriously and try to keep their biases out of it, even if they are not always completely successful. That is all anyone could reasonably ask.

Instead of labelling all news media as generically biased and therefore not to be trusted, try to understand that all information will have a bias and learn to identify specific incidents of it. Then learn to work around it by reading other sources with different biases, thereby getting the whole picture of a story. It is the news media's job to TRY to be as unbiased as possible. It is the news reader's job to TRY and be as informed as possible by reading varied news from different sources. Neither side will be perfect, as both are full of imperfect human elements, but overall it leads to a reasonably informed and educated populace, which of course is the goal of journalism.

And if you do not agree with what I have said here, I have a follow up question for you... if the current news organizations are so terrible and inherently biased, what alternative would you propose? What is your idea of a perfect, unbiased media landscape? And would your alternative truly lead to a less biased media or just a media with biases you happen to agree with?

They wrote an entire article about the all the danger that this event shows us except the most basic questions about the hack would have quickly lead you to a realisation that there was absolutely nothing here.

They even pin it on Lazy Bear the "Elite Russian hacking group". How the hell did they did they get that conclusion from malware? Unless they were shooting entire clips from the hip.

"Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security, officials say"

Even if we now know it's a lie.

I'm trying to figure out what would be the proper way to modify the title to show it's wrong and to still provide the readers the insight that the paper claimed something that was debunked?

I'm not sure what else it could be without it being much worse reason.

Instead of "stories" think of "memes"

Instead of "reporters" think of "salespeople"

Instead of "readers" think of "customers"

Instead of "publishers" think of "businesses"

With that map in mind, it's not hard to understand why many, not all, but clearly many do the shoddy reporting that they do. Like so many things in today's world, it's no longer about pride in your craft, but instead it's about making money. The result is it's increasingly difficult for the average person to tell the real news from the fake because the traditional sources of real news have abandoned this in favor of sensationalism. But on the upside, the Internet may yet save us by providing smaller outlets a chance to provide better reporting. I was very much intrigued by the WH using Skype to pull in reporters from smaller cities and areas that don't normally get a chance to participate.

<rant> During the recent Trump news conference, another aspect of what's going on jumped out at me. At one point in the news conference, the camera pulled back to show the room of reporters. What I found jarring was the age of the reporters; to my eye they looked like they were high schoolers. I was hoping to hear well thought out questions but instead most of them asked the same robotic questions on Russia. I don't think the media organizations are doing the American people (and the world) a great service when they send the least experienced staff members to events like this. </rant>

Remember that time you wrote a badly buggy site or piece of software? Remember how you probably did your best to not write bugs?

Would someone calling you incompetent really have been helpful to anyone at that time?

Lawyers also have a professional guild to which to answer, and if they say something offhand which turns out to be erroneous in a way that brings someone to grief, their guild will not be pleased with them.

In fairness, I probably wouldn't take the time here either; on the one hand, I block ads anyway and so don't have such problems, and on the other, I tend only to do that when it's to my own direct benefit that the issue be fixed, and broken ads on a site I'll visit once ever don't meet that test - when Postmates screws up their UI and I have to stub out some analytics functions to place an order, they get an email; here, I'd just add the site to my JS blacklist, reload, read, and go on about my day.