Category: Photography

Equipment, examples, history – all matters photographic

Major Apple purchases

It’s crazy how demanding web browsers have become.

Both my main computers are somewhat old, but they can run modern 3D games at low graphics settings and perform computationally-intensive tasks like converting RAW files to JPG. Nonetheless, I find both my iMac and my MacBook Pro routinely struggling to run GMail in Safari, Firefox, or Chrome.

If I wasn’t a PhD student, I would probably have replaced both computers years ago.

Tracking back through my archives, I have some records of major Apple purchases:

  • My 20 GB 4th gen iPod was $389 in 2004;
  • my 14″ 1.33 GHz G4 iBook was $1990 in 2005 (that was the computer I brought to England and used exclusively in Oxford) (iBook SN: 4H50911AS88);
  • my top-of-the-line 24″ iMac was $2,249 in 2008 (a gift to self for being gainfully employed, and the computer I am typing on now);
  • In May 2010 I paid $35 for Mac OS X 10.6.3 Snow Leopard!
  • I got one of many 160 GB iPod Classics for $279 in 2010 (still the best MP3 player ever; I need to replace the hard drive in my current one); and
  • I got my 13″ MacBook Pro for $1649 in 2011

I am pretty tied into the OS X universe. That’s how all my projects (academic, photographic, activist) are organized, including encrypted archives and backups.

I would love to get a Mac Pro (though apparently those available now are outdated and expensive) or an iMac Pro (not out yet, first-of-a-kind Apple products tend to have big problems, and crazy expensive at $5000+).

All told, I would prefer to avoid the all-in-one design. My current iMac has a great screen, but inadequate processing power for current applications. It cannot be used as a display for a faster computer.

End of the Cassini mission

After a 20-year mission, and to avoid any risk of contaminating Saturnian moons with microorganisms from Earth, the Cassini space probe was deliberately crashed into Saturn’s atmosphere today.

The science it has returned has been stimulating and the imagery spectacular. The watery moon Enceladus now joins Europa among the solar system’s most intriguing life-compatible bodies.

The ‘right to be forgotten’

In Argentina and the European Union, people can assert a “right to be forgotten“, in which internet companies are obligated to delete content which those complaining are unhappy to have online.

There is also a Canadian connection:

In June Canada’s Supreme Court ordered Google to stop its search engine returning a result advertising a product that infringed on a firm’s intellectual property… The Canadian ruling against Google, which applies worldwide, could be just the start. Later this year the European Court of Justice will decide whether the EU’s much-contested “right to be forgotten” applies not just to Google’s European sites, but to all of them. This would mean that links to information about people that is deemed “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” in the EU will no longer be returned in response to any Google search anywhere. If the firm does not comply, it may face stiff fines.

The Economist raises the risk that allowing such censorship by governments could “create a ‘splinternet’, with national borders reproduced in cyberspace”.

I am fairly skeptical about rights-based approaches to ethics to start with, in part because they aren’t very useful as soon as one person is asserting Right A against someone else’s Right B. In this case, the other relevant rights are freedom of speech and what might be termed the freedom to record history.

I think all this is particularly risky when it comes to photography. In many places, the fact that a statement is true is a defence against allegations of slander or libel. Unedited photographs are in some sense always truthful historical records, but there are nonetheless many reasons why people aside from the photographer or the media source using them might want to see them purged. Letting people use a supposed extension of their right to privacy as a mechanism for censorship risks stifling artistic and creative expression, as well as depriving the world of information about what really happened in various times and places.

It’s not surprising that people want unflattering things about themselves removed from the internet, from criminal records and critical news stories to photos they dislike and things they wrote themselves but came to regret. At the same time, the people who post media online have an interest in keeping it up, and the world as a whole has an interest in knowing what has happened in the past. Granting people the power to use the courts to manipulate the historical record seems worrisome to me, as well as a substantial burden for all the platforms where such records are stored.

One downside to electronic media of all forms is the possibility of after-the-fact censorship, which would be impractical for things like printed books and newspapers.