dragonsky

Well it’s a human pointing the camera and pushing the button. It totally depends upon the camera how much influence it has on the actual picture produced. Depending on your settings, hardware control and image processing can be applied to automate the production of a more acceptable image. Is the camera or the person holding it producing the image? Or is the photogenic environment the camera is being pointed at responsible for the resulting image?

Once I’ve selected one from the 20 or so images, had it printed, framed and placed it on my wall then weeks later notice it again when the light coming through the window catches it just right, I think that is a really great picture that transports me to another place.

Is it art? Because I was holding the camera does that make me an artist?

All I know is that my life is enhanced by having that image on my wall however it came to be there.

Yah Macffee, worse than most virus in the amount of energy and time it wastes.

I used to work in desktop support. One of our supervisors insisted that we have documentation on everything, even simple things like how to install a printer on a windows 95 workstation. The documentation had to include screen shots.

So rather than employ people who either new how to install printers on windows or could work it out (follow the prompts in the wizard) for themselves we employed people who would happily follow the step by step instructions in our documentation.

Everything fell apart when we migrated to Windows XP, where the instructions no longer worked, the screenshots were out of date and those support personnel who used to rely on all the documentation for step by step on how to install printers were left scratching their heads.

Documentation is great, but its main aim should be to detail the outcome required, why it's required and any unique situations that the reader should be aware of.

I find it amazing that anybody could spend the value of a small car on a piece of clothing.

If you think historically, this is in the range of cost that a knight would have spent on his armour, so more in the range of the utility of a main battle tank in modern terms.

One of the only things I used to love about having to wear a uniform was the lack of attention needed to spend deciding what to wear each day.

You may like clothing, playing with what you wear may give you joy, but for some having to find clothes they feel comfortable wearing, then having each day to select something to wear, ensuring that they meet some criteria that will avoid negative perception from their community is nothing short of hell.

When I find something that fits well, is comfortable and reasonably inexpensive, I purchase a bunch of them and wear them daily for the next couple of years.

Haven’t seen anybody successfully sue a alcohol company for being addicted to booze.

I've not encountered Godot before. Going to download and have a play. Might be just the thing to help scratch my game making itch without having to go into a heavy duty game engine or having to build from scratch..

Way to give advice that is guaranteed to get them killed. Bravo

The unfortunate thing is that most workers in big box stores don't seem to know anything about the products they are selling beyond the dot points right there on the label. They can how ever do a fine job at selling you the latest greatest in finance package, so I suppose that is something.

Witch exactly illustrates my point. You need to intelligently reason about what you have been told, understanding that you may not be a domain expert and that your conclusions will almost certainly miss something that the domain experts have taken into account.

When presented with a claim by authorities about a new virus and say it's going to be dangerous, do you think, authorities always lie about everything or do you think well virus are a thing, I know they can mutate because I know that if I get the flu this year, it's no guarantee that I will be immune from the version that will come around next year. You also have seen evidence that vaccines are generally safe and work because most people have had them and for the most part don't have people suffering from polio in the western world because of that.

You could say, nah, they lie, this is plot to force us to have genome altering vaccines that will install mind control chips that kill kittens. (yeah, over the top I know)...

Most people have a degree of trust (not faith, very different) until proven wrong that public health figures are actually their trying to improve public health.

> Educated" people can say what they want about how important it is to believe in the science and have faith in our researchers and the institutions they work for.

This comment shows the problem in the argument. Science does not require belief or faith. In fact the idea of faith is the antithesis of science.

Science is about the hypothesis supported by evidence and remains current knowledge until a hypothesis that is better supported by the evidence.

Questioning is required, inquiry is required, not faith.

The only people who benefit from yet another tax is the accountants who get paid to help the wealthy avoid those taxes.

The 1% already manage their affairs to reduce the amount of tax they pay, why would adding yet another tax change that?

I thought the point was that it was not level of poverty that was the problem but the level of inequality... These are of course related, but I would assume that the causality runs from inequality causing poverty rather than the other way around.

Giving people with no or little power a bit more money is not going to allow them to magically take control of their situation. If somebody is flat broke and struggling to pay the bills, giving them a little bit more money may improve their economic situation in the short term, but over the long term with more people having some disposable income, supply and demand will increase prices and good old inflation will balance things out.

If you ensure that people have more equal opportunities by improving access to education, improving access to services independent of location and remove barriers based on sex, race religion health care etc (look I don't have the answers to this) then at least a persons has a similar chance to everybody else to achieve their goals in life.

Trying to solve social problems by just moving money around is a very simplistic solution and can only ever work for simple problems. Inequality is a very complex problem with origins based in history and human nature. If you want everybody to have the same chance to achieve their personal goals then you have to give them the same baseline to start from, and only a small part of that is how much money they have in their pocket.

Your point is well made... The other thing you need to think about is that all those extra services can come with a reliability cost if your provider is not 100%. Most outages we've encountered have been because the HA infrastructure has decided to have problems rather than the underlying hardware or actual service we need to run.

Having all that "best practice" service is great if it works well, but when it becomes a checkbox on the purchase order then it can cause far more problems than it solves.

I have found that a lot of the push to outsource hosting is simply an attempt to deflect responsibility for problems rather than in expectation of actually providing more reliability.

Haggis and Black Pudding are two of the things I miss from our journey through Scotland.

This is a very good point. If I go to a physical shop to touch and get a feel for the product, generally it's after a lot of online research into the product range.

I don't go to a physical store expecting to be able to get any useful information from a sales person.

Given that the only thing that the shop has given me is the ability to view and touch the physical product, I don't feel any guilt in then ordering online if the physical store can't supply or deliver the product immediately or in a way that is beneficial to me.

I would assume that if you have a toolbox with only a small number of tools, you would spend some of your time using that set of tools to make other tools that extend your abilities.

I know that many developers in earlier times, before the internet, when programming languages were more limited and access to library repositories was not possible most experienced programmers built up their own libraries of functions that they would use and add to as required.

These days, we still have these extensions to the languages, but they are shared in repos and are called shared libraries or frameworks.

Your point is well made, but in the case of Excel, the real question is should you do a lot with it?

Stuck with windows due to work restrictions. Could happily use either Mac or Linux with windows VM for the unfortunate bits.

I think your point is supported by the number of times you hear people talking about having "faith" in science. This idea that science requires faith is something that confuses and annoys me.

The whole point of science is that it (in general) does not require faith as it provides evidence. There are some aspects of science where the presentation of hypothesis verges on faith, many aspects of cosmology where falsifiable experiment are not possible, but that is a very small part of science.

Why does health care have anything to do with employers? I simply don't get it. Somebodies health care should not be threatened simply because they may lose a job.

Could somebody explain to me (Australian) why/how sport and higher education became so closely linked? We certainly have university sporting teams here, but they are not really notable and certainly don't have the political clout that they do in US schools.

I'm wondering if there is a correlation between the level of bowing to media hype by including cameras and the actual scientific value of the mission?

The recent filming of EDL of the Perseverance rover was spectacular, but a significant aim of that mission and indeed most of the recent mars rovers has been to inspire an interest in exploration and science in the public, a significant part of that is getting happy snaps of events as they happen. The pictures taken were also of significant interest to the engineers involved as they showed events that were extremely dynamic, video being one of the best methods to gain information about the events without impacting the operation.

Web is more aimed at direct science, the products of which will, as happened with Hubble be used to make pretty pictures, which in themselves have limited scientific value, but are of enormous value in engaging the public. This combined with the difficulty and risk of capturing meaningful images given the environment makes live video a non starter.

This is very cool. Understand that you are constrained by the datasets you have available, but still very cool.

Just wondering if it would be possible to reverse the track and plot out where a waterway is fed from? I understand this would be a lot more complex and computationally expensive, but when out on a waterway I always find it interesting to think about where the water I'm floating on came from.

Again thanks for the work.

The last office with a door I had was in the old morgue of the hospital we supported. Was actually a pretty good location once you got used to the funky smells. Quiet, cool, dark and nobody came knocking on the door asking for us to fix there computers.

Where older and more venerable people being vaccinated early? They still are more likely to die if infected. Then a spread of vaccination to the general population. You would have to look at a breakdown of who was vaccinated at the time you saw the lower vaccine benefit.

Reading through the original article it seems that the only thing hindering this idea is it's scale. Considering how long it will take to kick off effective terraforming of Mars, it seems to me the at this could be achieved in time with a relatively small amount of effort.

My major concern with this is the accuracy of the information. I regularly put in dodgy data on registration forms where there is no financial contract. This puts me at risk of being held to that information. Because it's on the computer, it must be right.

Is there actually meat in the average ballpark hotdog now?

This is my life at the moment. Even when I think I may know what is being discussed, experience has shown that a lot of people will try and fake it and being the idiot who doesn’t have a clue and needs it explained is useful for everyone.

I don’t know what it is about the IT trade, but so many people seem to find it difficult to admit that knowing everything is impossible.