Generally yeah, but in this case? If they 100% knew for a fact that the sky above his head was black, then adding some black padding is fine. Maybe not from a photography standpoint, but from a journalistic one? Come on..
The flat lens eliminates optical aberrations such as the “fish-eye” effect that results from conventional wide-angle lenses.
Surely you wouldn't claim that is referring to wide-angle thermal lenses?
“In the future we can potentially replace all the bulk components in the majority of optical systems with just flat surfaces,” says lead author Francesco Aieta, a visiting graduate student from the Università Politecnica delle Marche in Italy. “It certainly captures the imagination.”
Oh yes it does. If you help the imagination along with misleading phrasing, that is. If you don't believe me, just read the rest of the comments here, most of them expecting to see some application in photography.
If you get good glass it'll beat the resolution/noisiness of your sensor anyway. Distortion and aberration can be fixed in software quite well; it sure beats waiting that won't come for a long, long time, if even ever.
Don't get me wrong, this is cool for what it actually applies to, but flirting with "capturing the imagination" in such ways gets no respect from me.
I'm surprised that you see politeness and qualification of criticism as "sucking up".
I don't, I see sucking up as sucking up. E.g. If someone says all black people should be killed, do I even have a right to assume they have great, superb, excellent intentions? Should I really start my response with lauding those? Nah. There's limits.
Sure, that's just being fair. And making it clear you're criticizing a thing, not the person who made or said the thing, helps a big deal.
But all that assumes good intentions behind what you criticize. They're all happy feel-good "we're in the same boat here" examples.
How would you criticize extreme greed or callousness? Or blind obedience to state authority, and hand-waving away murder? I've had bitter fights both with someone who kinda glorifed the RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion, not Royal Air Force), as with about anyone I run into on the web who says things like "Assange should be shot on sight, and without trial, traitor blah blah". And then there was this dude on a unmoderated forum who kept mocking someone else for being lesbian and having been raped as a child.
Reacting politely to things like that would have made me feel kinda dirty, you know? Beyond certain points I simply give up trying to change someone's opinion, and try to make it costly for them to have it. There are billions of people, some are complete sociopaths, or are deceived by the same; the more energy you waste on them the less you have for the rest. And being friendly to something disgusting drains me. Attacking it nourishes me. So that's that.
Well, or downvote, the cowardly little brother of negative feedback ^^
But to pad everything with sucking up to a total stranger? Nah. At least not when talking about general or bigger stuff, as opposed to personal suggestions or projects. I show people I care; just not necessarily about them. They kinda have to earn that, first.
After about ten seconds a victim will experience loss of vision and impaired judgement, and the cooling effect of evaporation will lower the temperature in the victim's mouth and nose to near-freezing. Unconsciousness and convulsions would follow several seconds later, and a blue discoloration of the skin called cyanosis would become evident.
At this point the victim would be floating in a blue, bloated, unresponsive stupor, but their brain would remain undamaged and their heart would continue to beat. If pressurized oxygen is administered within about one and a half minutes, a person in such a state is likely make a complete recovery with only minor injuries, though the hypoxia-induced blindness may not pass for some time. Without intervention in those first ninety seconds, the blood pressure would fall sufficiently that the blood itself would begin to boil, and the heart would stop beating. There are no recorded instances of successful resuscitation beyond that threshold.
When 30 minutes of additional breathing are enough time to bring a crew back to Earth or a space station. That is to say, in 340 years, give or take 5 years. By then they'll also bring condoms, because we will have realized that space isn't much good for a whole lot, except to have sex in it.
It's pretty bad... this is the list of blocked stuff from Ghostery:
AddThis
Commission Junction
Digg Widget
etracker
Facebook Connect
Facebook Social Plugins
Google +1
Google Adsense
Google Analytics
LinkedIn Widgets
Pinterest
Reddit
Statcounter
StumbleUpon Widgets
Twitter Button
also, this sentence broke my brain: Well what if they really couldn’t “breathe” water” but since the urge to breathe is natural, that must take place…
To me, and I really have to think of the the Simpsons movie when I say this, that just goes to show when you dream a dream, it can also become a website with technology in it. At the end of the day, that's something you can take away from all this, and that's nothing short of okay.
How? By constantly downloading the entire database of every application to your local drive? Where it would not only take up space, but could be modified to allow anything in?
"A totalitarian state simply enunciates official doctrine -- clearly, explicitly. Internally, one can think what one likes, but one can only express opposition at one's peril. In a democratic system of propaganda no one is punished (in theory) for objecting to official dogma. In fact, dissidence is encouraged. What this system attempts to do is to fix the limits of possible thought: supporters of official doctrine at one end, and the critics -- vigorous, courageous, and much admired for their independence of judgment -- at the other. The hawks and the doves. But we discover that all share certain tacit assumptions, and that it is these assumptions that are really crucial. No doubt a propaganda system is more effective when its doctrines are insinuated rather than asserted, when it sets the bounds for possible thought rather than simply imposing a clear and easily identifiable doctrine that one must parrot -- or suffer the consequences. The more vigorous the debate, the more effectively the basic doctrines of the propaganda system, tacitly assumed on all sides, are instilled. Hence the elaborate pretense that the press is a critical dissenting force -- maybe even too critical for the health of democracy -- when in fact it is almost entirely subservient to the basic principles of the ideological system: in this case, the principle of the right of intervention, the unique right of the United States to serve as global judge and executioner. It is quite a marvelous system of indoctrination."
-- Noam Chomsky, "Language and Responsibility" (1977)
But of course, that was then, today it's totally different, right? Right.
Which says nothing about the process (and possibly iteration) that went into the design before it was finalized.