tintedpane.com

Forbes Article

The most cogent economic rejoinder is that while the costs of the hardware are real, they’re also sunk–once you’ve bought the car, the marginal cost of the mile is mainly the cost of fuel. That’s correct, up to a point–higher fuel prices should indeed deter some discretionary driving and encourage some carpooling. But when you’re deciding what kind of fuel economy you want in your next car, you are looking at all the costs, and that gets you right back to cents per mile that just don’t depend much on dollars per barrel.

Wired Article

“Governments across the world will have their eyes on bank customers,” he added. “Since the software can monitor so many accounts, so many transactions, all kinds of people will be scrutinized, even those who in theory are just regular people. By default, not just money laundering but anything that violates the law, like tax evasion, will be hard to hide.”

As a consequence of AML surveillance, even citizens with no criminal intent or ties will have to become more efficient law abiders, bank officials said. Small breaches of the law, or just indifference, will no longer go unnoticed.

“Chances are that most of the time the software will catch not a money launderer, who is always wary, but a regular person,” said one bank official who did not want to be named. “If you got a fat birthday gift from your brother who works in the Middle East, would you like to get calls from the bank or the government asking for an explanation? In theory, that can happen.”

I’d like your thoughts and opinions on this. Is this anything new to be worried about? I know I’m not a fan of PATRIOT. I feel my security is not getting any better than before 9/11; all the while, my privacy and liberty are being taken away. Or is this FUD bullshit?

I’m disappointed about the Mavs. When you have an open shot, take it. You don’t need to try and find Dirk when he’s still being double teamed. Take the shot.

But I still have hope. Come on, let’s not fall to 0-3. Let’s tie the series.

Don’t throw in the towel.

F1 at San Marino on Sunday was awesome. Michael Shumacher’s come from behind at 13th place to 2nd. Those cars are fantagulous. I wanna be a racecar driver pimp. Or a motorbike racer pimp. Or a basketball pimp. Or just rich pimp.

Wow, three posts in one day. This must be a record. Before you go on, be warned this is a rather nerdy post.

I was reading from the fred miranda forums about people’s wish list for the next Canon DSLR. A poster suggested per pixel ISO adjustments. I was pretty blown away by this idea. Most digital cameras can only capture around 6 stops worth of dynamic range. As it turns out, our environment can span 10 stops worth of dynamic range. This guy’s proposition could preclude the need to bracket shots and the use of digital blending. Very interesting.

Here’s an excerpt:

bq. Now moving a bit out of the box….
How about the ability to alter ISO pixel by pixel?
ISO set to 100. The sky is too bright, the ground is too dark. Exposure is correct to the highlights and, based on a pixel by pixel histogram, the system alters the ISO of the dark areas to achieve correct exposure. I get to set a limit of 1 or 2 stops for this action.
This is over simplified. A reasonably good algorithm would be necessary to prevent very flat images.
Call it an electronic neutral density filter.

Source.

I think I’m coming around to Flickr. In the past few weeks since being bought out by Yahoo, they’ve lowered their prices ($25/yr) for the paid account and increased the upload bandwidth to 2GB/month. What I’m really liking about it is the notes functionality they provide. They have this neat feature where you (or your viewers) can identify parts on a picture (using rectangular lines) and add notes to it. An example that has come out have people publishing an aerial view of where they grew up (think googlemaps satellite photo) and highlighting areas of interest. Or say you take a group photo and others who were there can fill in the names of people you didn’t know.

Another feature I’m thinking that’s great for organizing pictures is keyword tagging. Smugmug (of which I’m currently paying for) also has this feature where you can use your IPTC keyword aware photo software (Adobe Photoshop Elements 3, IRFanView, IMatch, etc) that embeds keywords and you can search through them using those sites. Unfortunately you can only search through public pics in Smugmug. (I haven’t tried out private pics in Flickr yet).

One thing I wanted to note was that Picasa2 can search through IPTC keywords embedded in photos but cannot add them. You can only add captions from what I’ve seen.

I’ve also been tracking back to Pbase and saw that they have the ability to categorize pictures by the cameras and lenses that are used to take em. That is actually pretty nice, at least for a budding amateur photographer like me. I’m not too enticed by their pricing model (they charge by overall storage, not how much you can upload a month like smugmug and flickr), but that feature is really nice to have. I can find pictures shot w/ the professional cameras and it’s like visiting an art gallery from my computer: I can see good techniques, lighting, framing, etc… And it _seems_ that Pbase is less amateurish than the point ‘n shoots of flickr.

Apparently, their loss yesterday to the Golden State Warriors (126-99) guarantees a season finish worse than the L.A. Clippers for the first time in 12 years.

Go Mavs!

http://www.joeykatzen.com/alpha/ver4

I’ve gotten

bq. @c f g h j l n q s t u v x y z@

so far.

For version 3 I have:

bq. @a c e f g h i j k l m n p q r s t u v w x y@