Bush on Mars:

President George W Bush will announce proposals next week to send Americans to Mars, and back to the Moon.

Well the rovers landed in areas thought to be ancient oceans. Stands to reason there was marine life there once, and we all know what hundred million year old marine life smells like, don’t we?

I can’t believe I’m reading slashdot comments, but this one, in the context of outsourcing jobs, is spot on:

24/7 advertising. No job. No career. No credit. Basket full of crap at 28% interest. Get back on that fucking couch and keep your fucking mouth shut, consumer. This is the “corporate dream.”

The outsourcing problem is not going to go away. Conventional wisdom says third world labourers are disgustingly underpaid. No. It’s first world labourers who are disgustingly overpaid. The economy has been globalised. The free market will now commence adjusting itself.

Unless you’re an Owner, you will be forced to compete with people willing to work for a thousandth the cost. Unemployment will rise. Stock markets will also rise, as the Owning class gets richer on the backs of companies who effectively don’t have to pay salaries any more. Both these are happening now.

Eventually first world labour markets will readjust themselves. Expect PhDs on checkouts. Salaries and living standards will fall. There will only be a second world.

Survival Strategies

1. Invent supertechnology and pray for a Singularity. Nuclear fusion is enough to keep the world running while you try.
2. Start owning stuff. Tricky if you don’t already. There will come a point where everybody above a certain level of wealth will get richer, and everybody below will get poorer. This level will rise, faster than the rate at which the Owners get richer; thus low-level Owners will become high-level Renters, and start to descend from there. Outcome? Winner-takes-all tyrrany. Except it won’t come to that. There will be war and genocide and die-offs that stabilise the system.
3. Secede from civilisation. Buy farmland, invest in gold and guns. Become as self-sufficient as possible. When the currencies crash, trade the gold and shoot the invaders.
4. Learn to be poor. Frugal living is possible. Billions live on a starvation diet today. The quality of life is low, but you have no alternative, except to…
5. Die. All this is an extended corollary of Overpopulation anyway, so you’ll be doing everyone a favour!

The CCD sensor on my camera is 2272×1704 pixels, and it’s 7mm across, which means there are more than 100,000 pixels per square millimetre. My 15″ laptop screen, at a resolution of 1600×1200, has only 28px/mm^2. Both of them have exactly one broken pixel.

Laptop screen

Sensing and displaying are very different functions, but these numbers make the camera seems a lot more impressive than the screen.

I noted the laptop’s dead pixel almost immediately after starting it up for the first time. It’s in the bottom right hand corner, so I never notice it in everyday usage. After 8 months of using the camera, I’ve only just noticed its hot pixel: it only shows up on extremely dark areas, but it’s quite obvious:

Closeup of dark picture

“Hot” basically means it’s red, rather than black or white. Looking back on old pictures, it seems to have been there since I bought the camera, which is good, since that means the CCD isn’t deteriorating.

Some people send their cameras back because of problems like this, but it’s not unheard of to get back a replacement camera with even more dead pixels! The same goes for laptop screens, which manufacturers generally don’t replace unless there are more than 3 dead pixels, or one right in the centre. It’s impossible to fix the CCD so companies like Canon apparently do something to the camera’s firmware which makes it interpolate around the broken pixel. I don’t see any good reason why Canon can’t include this functionality in the end user software. It should even be possible to identify dead pixels automatically (take a pic with the lens cap on, look for red).

Extreme closeup of hot pixel

The hot pixel hasn’t really affected the surrounding pixels; it’s just the camera software making the problem bigger than it really is.

Noise

That’s a .RAW image taken with the lens cap on. Something’s going nicely wrong.

The camera, by the way, is an 8 months old Canon G3, and the laptop is a 30 month old Dell Inspiron 8000. Other than this (and the Dell having an ultra-buggy BIOS), both are highly recommended.

Testing testing testing.

Image search and comment search to come later. Much later.