the best digital camera

the best digital camera
We've read the reviews, done many of them ourselves, and listened to feedback from thousands of users. This list is our best estimate of the best cameras in every category. You can use this collection in a number of ways: If you have a vague idea of what you're looking for and need to make a quick purchase, you can confidently go with the model that we recommend. If you want to do more in-depth research, you can use this as a starting point. The answer to the real "best" camera in each category is more nuanced than we can convey in a single paragraph here, and highly subjective to boot; use this page as a jumping-off point for your research on other cameras. Our picks could change throughout the year as more user feedback rolls in, but right now, these cameras are sittin' pretty. By the DCHQ Staff.
Best Extended Zoom






Extended zooms, commonly known as superzooms, are the closest to all-in-one cameras as you can get, with enormous zoom ranges and stacked feature sets; though they're really just point-and-shoots on steroids, they offer out-of-the-box versatility that similarly priced dSLRs can't approach. Though it was released in 2010 and leaves plenty of room for improvement, the Panasonic FZ100 remains the best superzoom out there. It sports an ample 25-600mm (24x) lens with a handy 3-inch articulating LCD, hi-res electronic viewfinder, solid 1080i video mode, and speedy all-around performance including an 11fps burst mode. Overall image quality is solid, though JPEGs can look soft at large sizes. Thankfully, it's one of the few superzooms to support RAW capture, so the blemishes can be worked out in post-processing. No, it isn't a perfect package, but we haven't seen any compelling reasons to believe that any new models are any better, all things considered. There are some worthy options, though. The Nikon P500 is impressive mostly for its lens, sporting a class-leading 36x zoom range, starting at a class-leading 22.5mm. While reviews have knocked its image stabilization (but think of that telephoto!) and out-moded interface, its out-of-camera image quality is quite good, even in poor lighting. And for the best possible image quality, there's no better option than the Fujifilm HS20EXR. Unfortunately, reviews indicate that it's hampered by design issues, a wonky interface, and amateurish video mode. And if you really must fall into the budget-superzoom trap, lean toward the Nikon L120, the only cheap superzoom that doesn't feel like a toy.
Best Compact Mirrorless
The mirrorless or “interchangeable lens compact” class is coming into its own as a worthy alternative to traditional entry-level and mid-range dSLRs. Brands have developed identities and the camera-buying public is finally showing some interest in these compact dSLR alternatives. Sony’s NEX series seems to get the most attention thanks to an aggressive advertising campaign and prominent in-store placement. But the Micro Four Thirds (MFT) system is still the genre leader, and the Olympus PEN E-PL2 is our favorite compact mirrorless camera. It’s a close call between the E-PL2 and Panasonic GF2 and both are very good cameras, but we’re siding with the PEN because it handles the dynamic range better, is more affordable, and has in-body image stabilization, which will save money on lenses down the line. The GF2 is more compact -- pocketable, almost, with a 14mm pancake lens -- and has a more solid build quality, so if you’re looking for more of a street-shooter type camera, it’s possibly a better option. One of the great aspects of MFT is that they can accept pretty much any lens every made with the help of an adapter, so if your lenses from the film era can’t fit on any of the current crop of dSLRs, they can find new life with these cool new compacts (in manual focus mode, of course). Users stepping up from point-and-shoots will feel more immediately comfortable behind one of these cameras than behind even a basic dSLR, so they make for excellent “step-up” shooters.
We’d also be remiss if we didn’t mention the Panasonic GH2 in this writeup. It’s a Micro Four Thirds camera, but significantly more advanced than the GF2 and pretty much in a class of its own. It’s the best MFT stills shooter on the market, yet it’s a truly excellent video camera as well

Sony S1 tablet is coming

Sony S1 tablet is coming


Sources have been telling us since the news of the PlayStation certified smartphone announcement that Sony was also planning to follow Apple into the tablet market. While Sony confirmed that a tablet was in development, not much was known until now.


The new tablet from Sony is called the S1 and is PlayStation certified, which is no surprise. It will use a customized version of the Android Honeycomb OS and will feature the Qriocity media platform, as already seen on the PS3 for music in Europe.

The tablet is said to be sporting the Nvidia Tegra 2 and will utilize an innovative design that is said to make typing and using the device easier. The word is that it will be here for the holidays with a September release likely at this point. No clue yet on what it will cost, but it will not be cheap, according to our sources

how often do you have make love your boyfriend/girlfriend?

how often do you have make love your boyfriend/girlfriend?


- how often do you have sex with your boyfriend/girlfriend?
My girlfriend and I, right now we are having sex probably about one or two a month. We used todo it like almost everytime we saw each other but that died off. We only see each other twice a week due to school and work


- Maybe i'm wired a bit differently from other guys, but if I had sex every single day with my gf I know I would get really bored with it. I think once or twice a week is good, keeps things exciting. It also helps if you don't masterbate at all either

Guns take pride of place in US family values

Guns take pride of place in US family values
Despite the spiralling rise in the daily number of shootings in the US, its arms culture has a firmer grip than ever, reports Paul Harris in New York

Paul Harris

The Observer, Sunday 14 October 2007

Article history

Shirley Katz is not afraid to fight for her rights. Last week the schoolteacher, 44, went to court in her home town of Medford, Oregon, to protest at her working conditions. Specifically she is outraged she cannot carry a handgun into class. 'I know it is my right to carry that gun,' she said.

Katz was in court in the week that someone else took a gun to school in America. This time it was a pupil in Cleveland, Ohio. Asa Coon, 14, walked the corridors of his school, a gun in each hand, shooting two teachers and two students. Then he killed himself. Coon's attempted massacre made headlines. But a more bloody rampage, the murder of six young partygoers by Tyler Peterson, a policeman in Crandon, Wisconsin, got less attention, even in the New York Times - America's newspaper of record - which buried it deep inside the paper.

Guns, and the violence their possessors inflict, have never been more prevalent in America. Gun crime has risen steeply over the past three years. Despite the fact groups such as the National Rifle Association (NRA) consistently claim they are being victimised, there have probably never been so many guns or gun-owners in America - although no one can be sure, as no one keeps a reliable account. One federal study estimated there were 215 million guns, with about half of all US households owning one. Such a staggering number makes America's gun culture thoroughly mainstream.
 

An average of almost eight people aged under 19 are shot dead in America every day. In 2005 there were more than 14,000 gun murders in the US - with 400 of the victims children. There are 16,000 suicides by firearm and 650 fatal accidents in an average year. Since the killing of John F Kennedy in 1963, more Americans have died by American gunfire than perished on foreign battlefields in the whole of the 20th century.

Studies show that having a gun at home makes it six times more likely that an abused woman will be murdered. A gun in a US home is 22 times more likely to be used in an accidental shooting, a murder or a suicide than in self-defence against an attack. Yet despite those figures US gun culture is not retreating. It is growing. Take Katz's case in Oregon. She brought her cause to court under a state law that gives licensed gun-owners the right to bring a firearm to work: her school is her workplace. Such a debate would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. Now it is the battleground. 'Who would have thought a few years ago, we would even be having this conversation? But this won't stop here,' said Professor Brian Anse Patrick of the University of Toledo in Ohio. Needless to say, last week the judge sided with Katz and she won the first round of her case.
 

It is a nation awash with guns, from the suburbs to the inner cities and from the Midwest's farms to Manhattan's mansions. Gun-owning groups have been so successful in their cause that it no longer even seems strange to many Americans that Katz should want to go into an English class armed. 'They have made what was once unthinkable thinkable,' said Patrick, a liberal academic. He should know. He owns a gun himself. Even the US critics of gun culture are armed.
To look at the photographs in Kyle Cassidy's book Armed America is to glimpse a surreal world. Or at least it seems that way to many non-Americans. Cassidy spent two years taking portrait shots of gun owners and their weapons across the US.

The result is a disturbing tableau of happy families, often with pets and toddlers, posing with pistols, assault rifles and the sort of heavy machine-guns usually associated with a warzone. 'By the end I had seen so many guns and I knew so much about guns that it no longer seemed unusual,' Cassidy said. He keeps his in a gun safe in his home in Philadelphia. 'This turned into a project not about guns but about a diverse group of people,' he said.
At the cutting edge of weapon culture remains the gun lobby and its most vocal advocate, the NRA. Founded in the 19th century by ex-Civil War army officers dismayed at their troops' lack of marksmanship, the NRA has transformed into the most effective lobbying group in Washington DC. It has scores of lobbyists, millions of dollars in funds and more than three million members. It is highly organised and its huge membership is highly motivated and activist. They can have a huge influence on politics.
In 2000 Vice-President Al Gore supported stricter background checks for gun-buyers and the NRA organised against him, describing the election as the most important since the Civil War. It spent $20m against Gore in an election ending in a razor's edge result. Its influence was especially felt in Gore's home state of Tennessee, which he narrowly lost to NRA gloating. 'Their vote can select the President. They don't get to pick who goes to the White House. But they can tip the balance,' said Patrick.
Democrats have learnt that lesson now. Many shy away from gun control issues, wary of taking on such a vociferous lobby group. In the 2006 mid-term elections the NRA was able to back a historically high 58 Democrats running for office. Every one of them went on to win. Such influence over the past three decades has seen the NRA fight a successful campaign against new gun laws. It has in fact loosened regulations, spreading the ability to legally carry concealed weapons across 39 states. And this has all been done in the face of a fight from anti-gun groups, backed by much of the mainstream media. 'Politicians are so afraid of the gun lobby. They run scared of it,' said Joan Burbick, author of the book Gun Show Nation
But the key question is not about the number of guns in America; it is about why people are armed. For many gun-owners, and a few sociologists, the reason lies in America's past. The frontier society, they say, was populated by gun-wielding settlers who used weapons to feed their families and ward off hostile bandits and Indians. America was thus born with a gun in its hand. Unfortunately much of this history is simply myth. The vast majority of settlers were farmers, not fighters. The task of killing Indians was left to the military and - most effectively - European diseases. Guns in colonial times were much rarer than often thought, not least because they were so expensive that few settlers could afford them. Indeed one study of early gun homicides showed that a musket was as likely to be used as club to beat someone to death as actually fired.
But many Americans believe the myth. The role of the gun is now enshrined in mass popular culture and has huge patriotic significance. Hence the fact that gun ownership is still a constitutional right, in case America is ever invaded and needs to form a popular militia (as hard as that event might be to imagine). It also explains why guns are so prevalent in Hollywood. Currently playing in US cinemas is the Jodie Foster film The Brave One, a classic vigilante movie of the wronged woman turning to the power of the pistol to murder the criminals who killed her boyfriend. Foster's character is played as undeniably heroic. 'There is a fascination with guns in our culture. All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,' said Cassidy.
But this worship of the gun in many ways springs from economics and social problems, not the historic frontier. It took mass production and mass marketing to really popularise firearms. The Civil War saw mass arms manufacturing explode in America, including making 200,000 Colt .44 pistols alone. It saw guns become familiar and cheaper for millions of Americans. The later 19th century saw gun companies using marketing techniques to sell their weapons, often invoking invented frontier imagery to do so. That carries on today. There are more than 2,000 gun shows each year, selling hundreds of thousands of guns. It is big business and business needs to sell more and more guns to keep itself profitable. 'They will do anything to sell guns,' said Burbick.
But there are deeper issues at work too. The gun lobby's main argument is that guns protect their owners. They deter criminals and attackers whom - the gun lobby points out helpfully - are often armed themselves. Some surveys

 estimate there are more than two million 'defensive' uses of firearms each year. But others say that this argument is a shield, using guns as a way of deflecting harder arguments about how crime is caused by economics, poverty and racism. 'The argument over guns redefines a lot of social issues as simple aspects of crime,' said Burbick. She argues that a way to make Americans feel safer from crime is not to arm them with guns but to tackle the causes of crime: urban poverty, joblessness, drug addiction and racial divisions. 'We have to take back the language of human security. To talk about solving those social issues in terms of safety, not just letting the gun lobby control that language,' she said.
It is a powerful argument. Critics of America's gun culture often point to other nations with high levels of gun ownership - such as Canada and Switzerland - but much lower levels of violent crime. The fact is that America itself is equally divided. Patrick lives in a quiet, rural part of Michigan just across the state line from Ohio and the town of Toledo where he works. 'I would be amazed if anyone within four miles of me did not have a gun,' he said 'But our homicide rate is zero.'
Then look at where Cassidy lives. He has an apartment in Philadelphia, a city that is just as flooded with guns as Patrick's rural idyll, but also suffers from inner-city social ills. It has a stratospheric murder rate. 'There is a murder here every day. This is something that America has to come to terms with,' he said. Yet the differences do not lie with the simple existence of guns. Both places are full of them. They lie with the root causes of crime and violence, such as poverty and drugs, that blight many big cities. Guns seem neither to be totally the problem and certainly not the solution.
However, that is a debate few in America are having. In the meantime, the gun culture is so firmly entrenched and society so full of guns that there is little prospect of it retreating. Even those who advocate much tighter laws have long accepted defeat of the ideal of creating a society where guns are rare in public life, or even completely absent. 'That notion is absurd. There is no way to de-gun America,' said Patrick.
To cap a grim week, as Katz was winning her court battle in Oregon police in Pennsylvania were giving details of a raid on the home of a teenager who was plotting to attack a school. They found seven home-made grenades and an assault rifle. His mother had bought it for him at a gun show. The boy was just 14.
America's worst shooting sprees
Virginia Tech
Seung-Hui Cho a Korean American, was a loner who scared classmates. In April he killed 32 students and staff, then himself, at Virginia Tech, the worst US school shooting.
Amish killings
On a Monday morning in October 2006, truck driver Charles Roberts opened fire in a school in Paradise, Pennsylvania. He killed five children, then shot himself.
Columbine
Colorado misfits Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris assaulted their high school, Columbine, in April 1999, killing 12 students and a teacher. They then committed suicide.
Luby's massacre
In October, 1991 George Hennard drove a truck into Luby's Cafe in Killeen, Texas, shot dead 23 people and injured another 20 before shooting himself.
'Going postal'
Patrick Sherrill, an Oklahoma postal employee, took a gun to work in August 1986, shot 14 staff, then killed himself.
McDonald's massacre
In January 1984 in San Ysidro, California, James Huberty killed 21 with an Uzi and other guns at a McDonald's. He was killed by a Swat sniper.
Texas tower shooting
In 1966 Charles Whitman murdered his wife and mother, then climbed a University of Texas observation tower in Austin. He shot and killed 14 people before police shot him.

from - http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/oct/14/usa.usgunviolence

Dolphins in the Sea of ​​Japan after earthquake

Dolphins in the Sea of ​​Japan after earthquake
Dolphins in the Sea of ​​Japan after earthquake



Japan’s attempts to control the damaged nuclear reactors at the Fukushima plant by using sea water hopefully will succeed in preventing a complete disaster, but the price paid both to the nearby marine life and to the people of that battered country will be huge and long lasting.  Unfortunately, the runoff of millions of gallons of contaminated water cannot be scrubbed before it flows back into the ocean, and what happens to that water is very complex -  as reassuring as it may be to think that the radioactive waste is immediately diluted in the vast seas, that is really not what happens.  Instead, much of the contamination is likely to be deposited in the sediment of the shoreline, and to be transported along the coast.



 Depending upon how warm and salty the runoff is, masses of the water may be able to travel huge distances relatively undiluted and unmixed, to be absorbed by tiny planktonic creatures before working it’s way up the food chain to whales and dolphins.The processes at work in the ocean are so complex that even computer generated models can’t predict small scale events with certainty, but there are some basic principles that guide scientists, and for an easy to understand summary of those principles you might check here Near Japan, the warm Kurashiro current transports water from the south  until it runs into the cold northern water where  cooling begins.  The Fukushima plant is located where the two masses of water meet, helping keep most offshore contamination away from major urban coastal regions, but the present unforeseen highly contaminated near-shore runoff is not immediately transported to where those currents operate.


Assuming that the runoff is both warmer and saltier (due to evaporation) it will tend to mix and warm up the water in the immediate area, and changes in both temperature and salinity can be crucial to marine life.  This in turn affects how much and what types of the radioactive isotopes get taken up in the sediment and the creatures that live there before moving up to the 21 species of whales and dolphins found in the Sea of Japan alone.
Making the situation even worse is that Japan is heavily invested in fish and shellfish hatcheries, and produces everything from crabs to salmon in mass quantities, often with several species produced in the same hatchery.  Many of these hatcheries are vulnerable to fallout and/or pump sea water into holding tanks. The organisms raised there are released into the environment at various life stages, and the different life stages again take up isotopes at various rates, and further disperse into the marine environment where they can be eaten by bigger fish.

Japan depends heavily on fish and shellfish hatcheries.

The radioactive isotopes from the runoff may quickly move up the food chain in the local marine environment, leaving the fish-eating (resident type) orcas and other dolphins highly vulnerable to fairly immediate exposure as well as long term consequences.  Gray whales, which eat by scooping up the bottom sediment to filter out the shrimp-like organisms they favor, are possibly at the highest direct vulnerability.
Add the consequences of the fallout from the air in the region (which will be immediately taken up by plankton) and the effects are compounded.
Whale tissue, already highly contaminated with heavy metals and toxins, will become even more dangerous to eat and hopefully people worldwide will reconsider their policies towards hunting these animals. Many species migrate long distances, so it is difficult to be sure that a whale taken in one part of the world was not exposed to radiation in another – even the resident type orcas off the coast of Japan are believed to travel a thousand miles or more to more southern latitudes (based on the presence of unique ‘cookie cutter’ shark bites).

from - http://blog.seattlepi.com/candacewhiting/2011/03/22/how-japans-nuclear-crisis-might-affect-whales-and-dolphins/

Sony VAIO Z Series VPCZ134GX/S Notebook

Sony VAIO Z Series VPCZ134GX/S Notebook
 Sony VAIO Z Series VPCZ134GX/S Notebook
Sony VAIO Z Series VPCZ134GX/S Notebook
 

Sony VAIO Z Series VPCZ134GX/S Notebook PC Feature

• Box Contents – Sony VPCZ134GX/S Notebook, Standard Capacity Lithium-Ion Battery, AC power adapter, Power Cord; Software Bundle – Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit, Microsoft Office 2010 Starter, Norton Internet Security 2010 30-Day Trial Offer, 1-Year Limited Warranty
• Intel Core i5-460M 2.53GHz Processor with Turbo(R) Boost Technology up to 2.80GHz
• 3MB L3 Cache
• 4GB DDR3 1066MHz RAM (8GB max.)
• 128GB SATA SSD (64GB + 64GB)

Sony VAIO Z Series VPCZ134GX/S Notebook PC Overview

The Sony VAIO Z Series VPCZ134GX/S Notebook PC gives you the power and functionality of a larger PC packed into a durable notebook that weighs just over 3 lbs (with standard battery). By using a mercury-free backlit LED display, the Sony VAIO Z Series VPCZ134GX/S Notebook PC keeps one less chemical out of both your home and the landfills. From its convenient backlit keyboard to its Dynamic Hybrid Graphics system that delivers power when you need it, the Sony VAIO Z Series VPCZ134GX/S Notebook PC has all the features that make for a world-class mobile computing experience

from - http://sportliveupdate88.typad.net/2011/02/27/sony-vaio-z-series-vpcz134gxs-notebook-pc/