randomize

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6899748.html

Without reading the judge’s opinion, I can’t decide for myself if he is correct.

But that’s why we have an appellate court system, so more experienced jurists can consider new arguments from lower courts and make sure our system is sound.

In the remote chance that there is a valid issue, I’m just glad the prisoner wasn’t already executed.

Of course, that may be his whole point — you might be able to let a guy out 20 years later if the next DNA-like technology exonerates him, but you can’t un-kill him.

Personally, I’m against the death penalty, but not on some emotional or religious grounds. I just don’t like:

• the necessary economic cost of a thorough prosecution (vs. one for life)
• the irreversibility of the sentence
• the real-world racial disparity of application of death penalty for the same crime
• the unsettled medical questions about the most common method of execution
• the error rate, proven by groups like the Innocence Project
• the dubious intelligence of the average “jury of one’s peers” these days
• the lack of evidence that it is a deterrent.

The whole thing just seems sloppy, inaccurate, unnecessary, and expensive.

However, those are probably not what this judge is making an argument, so either his logic will succeed or fail with the appeals court. Either way that’s one more settled argument, no harm done to test it out.

I’ve had a TON of trouble with the CyberCommander, which is totally unlike my usual experience with Alienbees products.

After hours of debugging, I think I’ve finally created a checklist that works to get a multi-light setup working with my AB800s, CSR+ receivers, CST transmitter, and CyberCommander controller.

• The CSR+ receivers don’t seem to work correctly when the polarity is reversed on the outlet, so check that. They may also be sensitive to an open ground.
• According to PCB, the lights need good 120V line voltage.
• Use the telephone patch cords that came with the receivers. Telephone cords from Radio Shack seem to not work correctly.
• Make sure the CC and CST have fresh batteries. The CC seems to eat batteries if you adjust light much.
• Put all lights on the same Frequency, different channels starting at “1″
• Plug the 1/8″ patch cables that came with the CSR+’s into the back of the lights, but NOT into the CSR+s. This disables the slave sensor. The CyberCommander setting to disable slave sensors does NOT appear to work correctly. Tape the other end of the patch cables so nothing contacts them and fires the lights accidentally.
• Turn all of the buttons ON on the back of the lights, and put the power slider at MAX (1/1).
• Turn the lights on FIRST, then plug in the patch cables (which should already be plugged into the CSR+s). This *may* fire the lights once, or may not.
• If the DUMP button doesn’t work, something is wrong.
• The connector on the bottom of the CyberCommander is loose. Put it in your pocket and use the CST on the camera hot shoe. This fires ALL lights using the last-known CC settings (the CC sends the settings to the CSR+s, not to the CST).
• Make sure the test button on the CSR+ fires the light. You may have to press hard.

Separate checklist for the CyberCommander:

• Make sure the bracketing settings are at -0.0f for all channels and groups
• Make sure the Frequency is set to the same as the CSR+’s
• Go into Spec Lights and make sure each light has the right device type and modeling light wattage. Set all unused channels to “None”
• When one light channel is selected, only that light should fire when using the test button on the CC, but the CST test button or camera shutter will fire all lights.
• I think the CC sends out an update to all lights when the Channel mode is set to ALL, so go there first and adjust the lights to get it to send baseline settings.
• Adjust each channel individually up and down, making sure the modeling light tracks with the power setting (after a delay of a second or so) and fires without firing the other lights.
• Move back to the ALL channel and make sure all lights are firing at the right levels. Quickest way to make sure all is well is take a shot at f/22, 1/160s, ISO 100 with the camera pointed at the lights.
• The CSR+’s seem to “remember” CC settings. I don’t know how long, but make sure you start bringing the CC to every shoot since you can’t adjust the light power when using the CSRs with the telephone cords and a CST transmitter (you can adjust the lights manually if you use the 1/8″ trigger cables, but then the CC can’t adjust them).

Hopefully that’ll either help someone else out there, or at least give me a checklist to work from in the future.

Carolyn K. Reidy, chief executive of Simon & Schuster, was recently quoted saying of Amazon’s $10 standard pricing for books on the Kindle:

“We do not agree with their pricing strategy. I don’t believe that a new book by an author should ipso facto be less expensive electronically than it is in paper format.”

Fortunately for us, the market decides the price of products, not Ms. Reidy. This past week, there have been various other rumblings in the publishing industry, from Macmilan’s dispute with Amazon over pricing to the sky-is-falling predictions at recent publishing conferences, to the fearful reactions to Apple’s impending entry into the market.

Here are six reasons I do think that ebooks should be less expensive electronically than in paper format:

1. Cost of typesetting, printing, and returns is zero. This is the obvious one — electronic books cost nothing to produce, once you’ve converted the book to the appropriate formats. This impacts the publishing industry’s bottom line both for successful books (where there is a cost of printing and distributing each), and greatly reduces the financial risk of publishing an unsuccessful book (since bookstores aren’t returning unsold books for credit). These savings can and should be passed directly to consumers in a fair marketplace.
2. Electronic books can’t be shared or sold. We have, quite unfortunately, given up as consumers on forcing publishers to give us title to the books we buy electronically. Unlike a paper book, DRM technology locks up the books so we can’t resell them, give them to libraries, borrow them from libraries, or even share them with a friend for a few weeks. Publishers should realize that when they sell us a locked product that denies us the right of first sale, they are selling an inferior product with no residual value. That must be represented in the sale price, and should affect everyone’s profit up the chain, from the vendor to the publisher to the author. You can’t sell me a $20 electronic book over a $20 hardcover because the hardcover book has real residual value should I choose to part with it in the future. This goes double for textbooks.
3. eBooks allows publishers to reduce risk. While publishers still have to take on the risks of marketing, editing, carrying, and potentially providing non-refundable advances to the author, ebooks don’t require the same degree of risk planning to produce just the right number of books. Thus, electronic publishers can take on unknown authors (at lower royalty percentages) and works in niché subjects without the same risks as before. With long-tail economies, publishers can make more total profit on more works that sell, individually, much fewer copies than the big-name authors. This, in turn, will put publishers in a better position to negotiate with big-ticket authors.
4. Electronic publishing is green. Electronic books have a fraction of the environmental impact costs of paper books. This isn’t just about greenhouse gas, electronic publishing is also much more efficient when it comes to resource depletion (wood, water, and petroleum), acidification, and waste disposal. While our current lop-sided economic models rarely realize true environmental costs in the costs of goods sold, publishers should expect that these costs will hit them in the future in the form of regulations and pressures from forward-thinking distributors (like Wal-Mart), and the technologies they are either already putting in place or are planning to in the future to reduce environmental impacts can be side-stepped by paperless printing.
5. Cheap is the best way to combat free. Like it or not, paper books are getting easier to copy every day. Over 10 years ago, when I was in college, a number of students were known to all chip in to buy a textbook, run to Kinko’s and make $10 copies, and resell the original book. Now, they don’t even need the $10 apiece, just a few bucks for scanning. Textbook publishers were the first to be victims of piracy due to their ridiculous prices and the limited residual value of their books after the semester (due to an artificially-high rate of book revisions). Mass-market books and magazines are going to repeat the same mistakes as the music industry if they don’t learn the lesson that the easier way to combat piracy is to make it painless and inexpensive for people to obtain electronic versions of their works. Fortunately, competing with free doesn’t mean you have to be free–it just means you have to be “virtually free.” You have to hit people emotionally at a price that competes with frivolous entertainment and grande mochachinos. This is the reason that 30% of Amazon’s sales are electronic already, and iTunes sells more music than Wal-Mart.
6. The number of distributors is increasing. With Apple coming to the market, it’s time for publishers to not whine about the total price, but push for better deals from Amazon. Amazon’s costs for distribution are pretty cheap, and the more choices publishers have to reach people, the more distributors will have to do to court publishers. The best deal for consumers and publishers alike will be if Apple, like with iTunes, supports users putting works they didn’t publish through Apple in their iBooks library. While publishers not using Apple would lose the comfort of DRM, they would be able to keep access to Apple customers without being forced to take Apple’s deal. So, publishers should start now to push Apple to allow consumers to add unprotected EPUB files to their iBooks library, and thus keep themselves from becoming sharecroppers on Apple’s field, as they have been with the Kindle market.
7. Adapt or die. Number 7 is free of charge . Publishers have traditionally been the powerhouse for finding quality authors, funding their work, marketing it effectively, and managing the supply chain. Electronic publishing is already breaking down walls for independent publishers, who can contract with cost-effective contractors (a little plug for my brother’s company there) to produce quality ebooks, sell them directly (through Amazon or other web sites), and self-market them online. Sure, they may never sell a million copies, and 80% of self-published work aren’t worth the paper they aren’t printed on, but they are the new competition. If independent authors consistently meet or beat the prices of “published” works, new technologies will emerge to sort the wheat from the chaff, and people will find interesting independent authors to take up some of the relatively-fixed number of books they buy.

So, I encourage publishers to put some thought into where they want to be in 5 years. The reality is, it simply won’t involve nearly as many dead trees and ink-stained fingers, and they have an opportunity now to avoid the fear-driven missteps and heel-digging of the music and movie industries. Instead, they should focus on creating a marketplace with new profit opportunities and larger markets for themselves, while understanding that they simply must provide a better value for customers to survive.

Just in case anyone has been wondering, yes, I still intend to blog occasionally.

Watching Jobs et al on stage yesterday, there were a few lingering questions I have that I hope Apple addresses before the release:

• Camera, pretty please? I’m hoping a front-facing camera is a “one more thing” added at the end. This does seem like a no-brainer, a 2MP camera would add $10 to the cost.
• No GPS for wifi users? Apparently only 3G customers get the GPS feature. I see what the issue is: (1) GPS without cell tower assistance can take 40 seconds to get a lock, and (2) 99% of the time, if you don’t know where you are, you don’t have wifi coverage. Hopefully the wifi-based location services will be good enough to at least get me in the neighborhood when I do have a wifi connection and I want to use the map, movie listings, etc.
• Sync? Is Apple going to provide a way for iPhone users to sync their app settings between the iPhone and iPad? Sure, it would require developers to make some changes to their code, but would be very handy for people with both.
• Number of devices? Our household already has five authorized devices for iTunes content: my iPhone and Delanea’s, my Mac Pro and her Macbook Pro, and the Mac Mini we use as an HTPC in our living room. Adding an iPad to that will require me to de-authorize one device, and I can’t make that choice. If Apple doesn’t expand the number of devices, I won’t be considering buying new locked iTunes content.
• Stylus? I know Apple wants to be all intimate with their iPad, but I want to take notes in a meeting without looking like I’m finger-painting. ThinkGeek sells styluses that work with the iPhone, will they also work with the iPad’s touch sensor? If so, maybe someone will write a note-taking app (I don’t care about handwriting recognition, just handwriting and the ability to get electronic signatures on documents).
• Magazines? The only magazines I subscribe to are fashion magazines. It would be nice to get rid of those dead trees and keep it all on one device, and bookmark pages I like. No news about any sort of periodical subscriptions for iBook during the demo, just the same old “look it’s a newspaper web site with columns!” demo.
• iTunes Plus content? Will the liner notes, etc. for the fancy iTunes albums be viewable on the iPad? Seems like a natural fit.
• Bluetooth keyboard support? Or will I be forced to use the dock-connected one when I already own a perfectly good bluetooth Apple keyboard?
• A4 Chip? So, is this thing instruction-compatible with the ARM processors used in the iPhone/iPod, or are they doing a little Rosetta magic on us? If the latter, I would expect iPad-specific compilation to result in better performance and longer battery life vs. running iPhone apps directly. What are they doing to allow apps to be downloaded with both iPhone and iPad native binaries?
• Keyboard-like accessories? The keyboard dock tells me there is a way for an accessory to use the 30-pin connector to emulate a keyboard. Looking forward to seeing devices like bar-code scanners and credit-card swipers that dock snugly to the bottom of the iPad and merely emulate a keyboard for data entry.
• Audio reading in iBook? Kindle has its computer read-aloud feature, and while it caused a stink with stingy publishers, it is a useful feature. If Apple isn’t going to add accessibility features like this to the iPad, will they at least work with publishers to “bundle” audiobook versions of books with the ebooks? It would absolutely rock if the user had the choice to switch back and forth between a human-read audiobook and an ebook format, or even have them running simultaneously.
• Voice control? iPhone has it, and iPad has a microphone. So, will we be able to control our iPad by voice command? Please say yes.
• Free book library? iTunes has some free content, so does the App Store. Google offers more than 1 million public domain books in ePub format. Will we be able to get to these through the iBooks store, or at least add them manually?
• iBook on iPhone? I have used the Kindle app on my iPhone to read a few books, so will Apple offer similar functionality so those without the iPad can still enjoy the convenience of the iBook store?
• Kindle for iPad? Speaking of the the Kindle iPhone app, will Amazon upgrade the app for iPad use, and will Apple approve it? It would be smart for both of them — Apple needs to woo Kindle users who’ve already amassed a library, and Amazon’s unsexy etch-a-sketch is going to start losing the important market share (the books, not the reader) to the iPad at some point.
• SVG? Come on guys, Safari supports it on Mac and Windows. Can’t be that hard to give us iPad/iPhone support for scalable images! And it would shut up most of the whining about Flash (which I have absolutely no interest in seeing added to the iPad or iPhone).

Ok, that’s it for now. Guess we’ll see in the coming weeks how all this pans out. Despite a few small disappointments, I will be among the first in line for an iPad. I’ve been waiting for it since I was a kid watching the PADDs on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

• Apparently I bought one of the last Saturns. #
• IT folks can't find CABs for XP SP2, so I'm dead in the water on new computer. No IIS, No .NET (waiting on IIS)… #
• Hmm… looks like Pushpin got bought out by Apple. Pity, was looking for alt. map API source (http://www.pushpin.com/) #
• w00t! Got beta email to start a "stack exchange" site based on #stackoverflow code. Have 10 ideas for useful SE sites, need to pick one. #
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• What do *you* see in my artwork? I have to write my first real artist's statement tonight, need ideas… #
• @Mallioch What's VS? emacs FTW! lol
  (Seriously, I usually avoid VS for .NET, but I'm weird that way and prefer UltraEdit) in reply to Mallioch #
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• @NocturnalUtopia nothing boring about a steady paycheck lol! I'll keep living .NET/SQL 9-5 if I can shoot what I want on the weekends… in reply to NocturnalUtopia #
• I think I need to change my MM to have the word "implied" in big bold letters. Implied models seem to not believe that I'll work with them. #
• w00t! New laptop at work. Decided to switch from a desktop when I heard the laptops were actually faster now. Oodles of things to install… #
• Great nuggets from Woody Allen in this interview that art photographers can sympathize with: http://bit.ly/JNHCW #
• @AnnaEvans Well at least you have us to entertain you here in the twitterverse… in reply to AnnaEvans #
• Thought I might have an assistant for Austin, but they wanted to be a second shooter too–not bad, just not a good fit for these shoots. #
• @rondavis007 My checklist: mode, ISO, EC, clock, clean lenses/sensor, charge batteries, format CF, check lens focus/IS/VR setting, lens cap. in reply to rondavis007 #
• @GOREWHORENOS Unfortunately, plenty of creeps on one side of MM and flakes on the other. Just be choosy and don't worry about the rest! in reply to GOREWHORENOS #
• @coreyward thanks! no biggie, was just a new photog. wanting to learn, thought she just wanted to assist but wanted to shoot too. in reply to coreyward #
• @coreyward the outdoor situation would have just made us more of a spectacle, so I declined. #

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• I can't squeeze Terry Gilliam's great quote at the end of this into 140, so here's the link: http://bit.ly/EA4Me #

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• 684 Address Book entries left, probably 800 when I started. Wow, that took awhile to sort through… #
• Bad: OMP talent search sucks worse than before, and most of my model contacts have retired. Good: Chinese buffet with the fam! #
• Two great models booked for Austin, and one tentative. Still looking, need two more for the concept (not all at the same shoot). #
• Photography casting call secret: most models read their emails / messages / casting calls on Sunday afternoon. #
• Booked two more models for Austin! One great experienced model, one new model. Now doing 3 shoots, looking for a few more models. #
• @SHO_Dexter in 5min. #
• Hmm… have new moo business cards ready for weddings, but can't order because we have no credit cards–had to report stolen, no new #s yet. #
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• Preparing for a bridal shoot, keeping an eye on the sky… #
• Delanea's wallet and cash stolen (but no photography equipment) while at bridal shoot. Net profit: $0 for the day. #
• I hate when a sweet but flaky model sends me a FR. Don't know how to respond. To me, friend = endorsement / desire to shoot, and I don't. #
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