A couple of quotes from the dictionary.com definition of faith: Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. The theological virtue defined as secure belief in God and a trusting acceptance of God's will.
Faith has other meanings such as Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing that aren't relevant here. When referring about Religious faith, the lack of a need for evidence is key.
Perhaps the GP should have changed:
"Religion is about believing things in the face of hard evidence (faith)"
to
"Religion is about believing things whether or not there is any hard evidence (faith)".
In the UK the slightly more expensive Acorn BBC Micro competed with the C64. It was released a year earlier, and had a great keyboard (except for maybe the positioning of the 'delete' key).
I drove a few crappy rental cars around the Greek islands this summer, and at one point I stalled a little Peugot 105 driving straight up a reasonably steep hill in first gear with my foot to the floor. Even in its lowest gear, the car just ran out of power.
You can't buy a used motorcycle of any size in the US for $2,500
Of course if you can only ride it half the year
As an all-weather rider in England, I'd just like to say this statement isn't necessarily true.
In northern parts of the US, it is true, and the original poster was referring to the US. I've bicycled through a few Canadian winters. Two wheeled vehicles have this tendancy to not be able to stay upright or go round corners here, especially on the mix of soft snow and hard packed ice that we have on the roads here. You see roughtly zero motorbikes on the road between about November and April. The big decision is whether to go for winter or all-season tyres on your car, not whether to get the bike out or not.
Intel's Classmate hasn't piggy backed on One Laptop Per Child in any way, what they're offering is "one computing solution per student", see- a totally different thing.
Take a look at the cleaned-up HD version of an old movie like Casablanca. The quality is just stunning. Actually, old movies are one the things that impresses me most about high-def formats (the other is Planet Earth). Even with the compression added by HD Cable TV, watching old movies from the 50's look amazing in 1080i.
I don't think they actually 'want' fraud, I think that that eliminating it altogether just costs more at the moment than they are losing. Visa won't lose their profitable monopoly by eliminating fraud.
The UK for example has switched almost exclusively to "chip and pin" http://www.chipandpin.co.uk/ Visa cards. Some smaller stores and fast food outlets don't even accept old-fashioned signature-only credit cards any more.
Most banks in the US/Canada charge fees for a fixed number of transactions, your bank just noticed a revenue stream that it had left untapped.
Sometimes it's difficult to tell if the fall-through was intentional when maintaining old code, an explicit fall-through might have been better. Sometimes it help to put a "//fall through" comment in place of the break.
A better way to reproduce fall-through with 'if' statements would be to create a false boolean variable that names the reason for falling through, and set it to true in one or more of the earlier 'if's.
I just installed Gutsy on an 4 year-old Fujitsu laptop that'll sit in the corner. Auto-detected everything; built-n Centrino wireless, battery meter, trackpad, etc. Easiest and quickest OS install that I've seen in ages.
It seems that the platform that they were on fell 40 stories, and there is no analysis of how or why it fell- if the spool of cable supporting it was still attached it could have slowed their descent a little. Even in freefall the platform could have lowered their terminal velocity a little.
The media and the public love to take an already impressive survival story and exaggerate it. As I said there are always other circumstances with these stories that skew the odds in the survivor's favour. People who fall 40 stories and land on concrete have so little left of their skull or torso that 'survival' isn't really up for discussion.
Unfortunately some of these anecdotal stories are quite hard to believe. Often the onlookers have confused a partially open parachute with no parachute at all, or the already impressive survival story gets exaggerated up from a partially opened parachute, to no parachute at all. The most plausible ones involve decellaration over a decent distance, like hitting a dense tree + falling into deep snow underneath, etc.
She didn't have a parachute, but she did however have half a DC-9 around her. This could have both lowered the terminal velocity, and cushioned the impact through providing a crumple zone. There could have been seat cushioning and, rather unpleasently, other bodies around her too.
I think it's more accurate to say that she survived a plane crash in half a plane than freefall without a parachute.
Either way it's an impressive and extremely fortunate piece of accident survival.
Re:The Man Who Rode the Thunder
on
Flying Humans
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Re:The Man Who Rode the Thunder
on
Flying Humans
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately the "man survives X thousand foot fall without parachute" are almost always wrong, or at the very least misleading. Typically the person fell under a partially open parachute- often still a remarkable survival story, most people die under half-open parachutes; it's quite possible to die under a fully open parachute if you land badly.
In this case, you seem to have confused the story that you quoted a little. The page that you sited states that he "had the ride of his life in his parachute", rather than it being ripped away. This detailed account from has him ejecting at 47,000 feet, and his parachute opening automatically a while later at sometime just above 10,000 ft (my skydiving calculations are a bit rusty, but this was probably about 3 minutes of freefall). He was under the chute for a lot longer than he was in freefall. Sources that I found said 40 minutes and 65 miles, 60 minutes and 150 miles are not improbable either.
Patrick De Gayardon
on
Flying Humans
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Patrick was working on developing these winged suits before he died when a rigging error caused his parachute to malfunction. He was planning a way of skiing with one of these suits, so that he could take off and land on the way down. http://www.bpa.org.uk/skydive/pages/people/gayardon.htm
The word is 'Zeerust', it's a much better word and Douglas Adams defined it, so lets not use these crappy hyphenated words that sound a bit zeerust themselves...
The war could be averted in the future if dual-format players become the standard. Then issues like licensing fees and manufacturing cost will govern which format gets which films, and the consumer will forget that there is a difference between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Remember back in the dark ages when you cared about the difference between DVD+R and DVD-R?
TV Advertisers are already using the terms "HD Blu-Ray" and "Blu-Ray DVD", soon they can combine the two and call it HD-BR-DVD, and then abbreviate that to HD-DVD
AT&T has always had overpriced data plans, and the iPhone plan is no exception ($20/month for unlimited).
Try getting a data plan in Canada, where the rates are criminally high, someone has to take these crooks to court soon as they're stunting growth of the mobile internet in Canada. Some pricing highlights (in CAD$):
Note that most of these providers have other crappy plans where you can browse "$100 selected sites", or get unlimited MSN Messenger, or something similar, for a set fee.
I often use the analogy that if you don't have one of the higher usage rate plans, it's cheaper to copy your data to a 3.5" floppy disk and FedEx the disk around the world than it is to transfer the data over GPRS.
"It'll be a slower adoption than we saw with DVDs" - I think you're forgetting that DVDs took a few years to catch on. They released in 1997 in the US, and it took 5 years to overtake VHS: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FNP/is_7_41/ai_84599856
Give HD-DVD another 4 years- if the big shiny TVs and High Def players are cheap enough, and the media comes down to a comparable price, one or both formats could be flying off shelves.
HD DVD/Blu-ray isn't 'pristine' (assume you mean uncompressed), but when pausing a frame of an HD-DVD it is hard to see any compression artifacts at all, the picture is quite remarkable.
Hitting pause with a cable HD signal on my PVR is quite another story, as you say they don't have anything like enough bandwidth for HD. The picture still does, however, look 10x as good as 480i.
Tell that to the movie studios and directors. They like 24fps because it makes a movie 'feel cinematic'. Something about that flickering reminds you that you're watching a movie. If the action were too smooth it might feel like a home movie.
The motion blur is the reason that a 24fps movie looks about as smooth (unless the camera pans fast) as a high frame rate video game.
I agree with you though, we should have a default that is something better than 24-30fps. 120fps might be a good rate for the long term- it's a multiple of 24 and 30 (and of course 60).
I've seen recent TV commercials where they say "coming soon on DVD and High Def Blu-Ray" or "coming soon on DVD and Blu-Ray DVD". Shows there's a problem with the consumers' awareness if the name needs to be qualified like that.
Slashdot Mirror
A couple of quotes from the dictionary.com definition of faith: Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. The theological virtue defined as secure belief in God and a trusting acceptance of God's will.
Faith has other meanings such as Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing that aren't relevant here. When referring about Religious faith, the lack of a need for evidence is key.
Perhaps the GP should have changed: "Religion is about believing things in the face of hard evidence (faith)" to "Religion is about believing things whether or not there is any hard evidence (faith)".
Apple has solved this problem by releasing the MacBook Air without a DVD drive built in- it's much easier to throw away and replace a USB accessory.
In the UK the slightly more expensive Acorn BBC Micro competed with the C64. It was released a year earlier, and had a great keyboard (except for maybe the positioning of the 'delete' key).
I drove a few crappy rental cars around the Greek islands this summer, and at one point I stalled a little Peugot 105 driving straight up a reasonably steep hill in first gear with my foot to the floor. Even in its lowest gear, the car just ran out of power.
Intel's Classmate hasn't piggy backed on One Laptop Per Child in any way, what they're offering is "one computing solution per student", see- a totally different thing.
Take a look at the cleaned-up HD version of an old movie like Casablanca. The quality is just stunning. Actually, old movies are one the things that impresses me most about high-def formats (the other is Planet Earth). Even with the compression added by HD Cable TV, watching old movies from the 50's look amazing in 1080i.
I don't think they actually 'want' fraud, I think that that eliminating it altogether just costs more at the moment than they are losing. Visa won't lose their profitable monopoly by eliminating fraud.
The UK for example has switched almost exclusively to "chip and pin" http://www.chipandpin.co.uk/ Visa cards. Some smaller stores and fast food outlets don't even accept old-fashioned signature-only credit cards any more.
Most banks in the US/Canada charge fees for a fixed number of transactions, your bank just noticed a revenue stream that it had left untapped.
Sometimes it's difficult to tell if the fall-through was intentional when maintaining old code, an explicit fall-through might have been better. Sometimes it help to put a "//fall through" comment in place of the break.
A better way to reproduce fall-through with 'if' statements would be to create a false boolean variable that names the reason for falling through, and set it to true in one or more of the earlier 'if's.
Don't tell me, let me guess, these movies are going to be about a long journey that takes 6-odd hours of screen time.
Anyone up for editing out the hobbits and slow bits and making a kick-ass 2-hour version of Lord of the Rings?
I just installed Gutsy on an 4 year-old Fujitsu laptop that'll sit in the corner. Auto-detected everything; built-n Centrino wireless, battery meter, trackpad, etc. Easiest and quickest OS install that I've seen in ages.
It seems that the platform that they were on fell 40 stories, and there is no analysis of how or why it fell- if the spool of cable supporting it was still attached it could have slowed their descent a little. Even in freefall the platform could have lowered their terminal velocity a little.
The media and the public love to take an already impressive survival story and exaggerate it. As I said there are always other circumstances with these stories that skew the odds in the survivor's favour. People who fall 40 stories and land on concrete have so little left of their skull or torso that 'survival' isn't really up for discussion.
Unfortunately some of these anecdotal stories are quite hard to believe. Often the onlookers have confused a partially open parachute with no parachute at all, or the already impressive survival story gets exaggerated up from a partially opened parachute, to no parachute at all. The most plausible ones involve decellaration over a decent distance, like hitting a dense tree + falling into deep snow underneath, etc.
She didn't have a parachute, but she did however have half a DC-9 around her. This could have both lowered the terminal velocity, and cushioned the impact through providing a crumple zone. There could have been seat cushioning and, rather unpleasently, other bodies around her too.
I think it's more accurate to say that she survived a plane crash in half a plane than freefall without a parachute.
Either way it's an impressive and extremely fortunate piece of accident survival.
Sorry, here's the TIME story from 1959: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,937849,00.html
Unfortunately the "man survives X thousand foot fall without parachute" are almost always wrong, or at the very least misleading. Typically the person fell under a partially open parachute- often still a remarkable survival story, most people die under half-open parachutes; it's quite possible to die under a fully open parachute if you land badly.
In this case, you seem to have confused the story that you quoted a little. The page that you sited states that he "had the ride of his life in his parachute", rather than it being ripped away. This detailed account from has him ejecting at 47,000 feet, and his parachute opening automatically a while later at sometime just above 10,000 ft (my skydiving calculations are a bit rusty, but this was probably about 3 minutes of freefall). He was under the chute for a lot longer than he was in freefall. Sources that I found said 40 minutes and 65 miles, 60 minutes and 150 miles are not improbable either.
Patrick was working on developing these winged suits before he died when a rigging error caused his parachute to malfunction. He was planning a way of skiing with one of these suits, so that he could take off and land on the way down. http://www.bpa.org.uk/skydive/pages/people/gayardon.htm
Blue Skies Patrick
The word is 'Zeerust', it's a much better word and Douglas Adams defined it, so lets not use these crappy hyphenated words that sound a bit zeerust themselves...
The war could be averted in the future if dual-format players become the standard. Then issues like licensing fees and manufacturing cost will govern which format gets which films, and the consumer will forget that there is a difference between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Remember back in the dark ages when you cared about the difference between DVD+R and DVD-R?
TV Advertisers are already using the terms "HD Blu-Ray" and "Blu-Ray DVD", soon they can combine the two and call it HD-BR-DVD, and then abbreviate that to HD-DVD
Try getting a data plan in Canada, where the rates are criminally high, someone has to take these crooks to court soon as they're stunting growth of the mobile internet in Canada. Some pricing highlights (in CAD$):
http://rogers.ca/ MB for $15, 30MB for $60, 200MB for $80
http://fido.ca/ $50 per MB without a plan, 25MB for $60, 200MB for $100
http://www.telusmobility.com/ 30MB for $60, 1GB for $100
http://www.bell.ca/ 30MB for $60, 1GB for $100
Note that most of these providers have other crappy plans where you can browse "$100 selected sites", or get unlimited MSN Messenger, or something similar, for a set fee.
I often use the analogy that if you don't have one of the higher usage rate plans, it's cheaper to copy your data to a 3.5" floppy disk and FedEx the disk around the world than it is to transfer the data over GPRS.
"It'll be a slower adoption than we saw with DVDs" - I think you're forgetting that DVDs took a few years to catch on. They released in 1997 in the US, and it took 5 years to overtake VHS: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FNP/is_7_41/ai_84599856
Give HD-DVD another 4 years- if the big shiny TVs and High Def players are cheap enough, and the media comes down to a comparable price, one or both formats could be flying off shelves.
HD DVD/Blu-ray isn't 'pristine' (assume you mean uncompressed), but when pausing a frame of an HD-DVD it is hard to see any compression artifacts at all, the picture is quite remarkable.
Hitting pause with a cable HD signal on my PVR is quite another story, as you say they don't have anything like enough bandwidth for HD. The picture still does, however, look 10x as good as 480i.
Tell that to the movie studios and directors. They like 24fps because it makes a movie 'feel cinematic'. Something about that flickering reminds you that you're watching a movie. If the action were too smooth it might feel like a home movie.
The motion blur is the reason that a 24fps movie looks about as smooth (unless the camera pans fast) as a high frame rate video game.
I agree with you though, we should have a default that is something better than 24-30fps. 120fps might be a good rate for the long term- it's a multiple of 24 and 30 (and of course 60).
I've seen recent TV commercials where they say "coming soon on DVD and High Def Blu-Ray" or "coming soon on DVD and Blu-Ray DVD". Shows there's a problem with the consumers' awareness if the name needs to be qualified like that.
I forgot to mention 'Shadow Copy', which has already saved me from re-doing several hours work.