Digital photography is clearly fascinating. I'm finding that I tend to carry my little 3 megapixel camera where I wouldn't pack my technically superior 35mm SLR. My photography skills have greatly improved despite the fact that the digital images are of much lower quality than what I get with 35mm.
Phil Askey writes one of the better digital camera comparison reports and his reviews of the new Fuji S2 and the Nikon D100 are interesting. They have conventional SLR bodies combined with near state of the art 6 megapixel imaging arrays. While this is still a distance from film, it is good enough for even some professional use.
This is also a great place to visit before you buy a digital camera of any type.
http://www.dpreview.com/
Unless you are a pro, it doesn't make sense to pay a huge amount for a digital camera at this point as the technology is still evolving. Over the past few years there has been great interest in Foveon. Not only is its founder legendary (Carver Mead of CalTech), but early images have been spectacular - amazingly better than conventional digital imaging.
A product still hasn't hit the streets (the date keeps moving out) and the announced partner for the first camera doesn't inspire confidence, but this is clearly something to watch - in theory it could kill film for most uses.
http://www.foveon.com/
Lawrence Lessig recently gave what may be the year's benchmark speech on copyright. Whether you agree or not, you need to read it
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2002/08/15/lessig.html
or listen to it
http://pez.oreillynet.com/media/7-24-1Lessig.mp3
or follow a rather elaborate flash presentation
http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free.html
so are you agitated yet?
Lessig makes the point that copyright and patents are not physics, but are the work of Congress, lawyers and corporations. There are things that can be done, but very few people seem engaged.
I'm not defending Apple as a shining star of the intellectual property game (although when compared with Microsoft they probably are), but it is interesting to note that the latest version of their OS is available in a "Family Pack" - by paying a roughly fifty percent premium over the single user version, one is entitled to run it on up to five computers in the household. A very interesting feature of this is that it done on the honor system. Unlike Adobe, Microsoft and many others, Apple does not check registration centrally or on LANs. This is a very interesting experiment.
6:07:02 AM 
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