Posts by Graham Bartlett

Re: What a fool

In fairness, she could well have been getting her own gear together and not particularly watching them set up. So it might only have been afterwards that she realised she'd not seen them hang-check.

The two main people responsible though are the instructor and the "nose-man". Hang-gliders are tricky (although not impossible) to set up for launch on your own, and stray gusts can catch you unawares when you're getting ready, so usually you have someone holding the nose-wires of the glider to keep it under control. That person is responsible for checking that you've done your checks, including holding the glider while you hang-check, and visually scanning the glider for obvious rigging faults. If this guy didn't have someone helping him launch, that's an important safety element missing - especially if he's doing this for a living.

Re: To quote Jean-Luc Picard

I'm amazed it took until the second page before someone said that!

Re: How inappropriate!

If 47 is "old people" round your way, I suspect you're not long out of school. To a major degree, it's like hacking. You might not be as pretty to look at, but you're a whole lot more effective in action.

Cue the "she was only a coder's girlfriend, but she knew what to do with a dangling pointer" jokes...

(Oh all right then, let's have another - "she was only a TCP/IP expert, but she was stacked".)

Re: Well bugger me sideways

Plenty of pilots have indeed used PC-grade flight sims to practise. And *all* commercial and military pilots have used pro-grade flight sims to practise.

Re: Accelerating the water cycle = more fresh water

Assuming someone will build a megaproject water pipeline spanning thousands of miles to get that extra water from the wetter areas to the dryer areas, through some of the poorest countries in the world and in some of the harshest conditions. Since us Brits (who aren't short a bob or two) can't manage to build a pipeline from the north to the south through a few hundred miles of well-tamed farmland, I'd say that plan was SOL, wouldn't you?

Re: Crime scene photography

Except that one of the reasons they take lots of shots is so they've got good-quality pictures of everything. Not gonna work if you're only getting webcam-quality, regardless of whether you can shift the focus.

Re: An automatic lawnmower...

Maybe it's just me, but doesn't $3K seem a lot to spend on a lawnmower? You can easily get a bloke to do it for twenty quid (say thirty dollars). That gets you 100 lawn-mows for the same price, which I suspect is more than you'd get out of the robot lawnmower before something important went wrong with it.

Re: Need for debate doesn't justify criminal behaviour

"Dehumanising"

Since it is not human (in the opinion of medical experts specialising in foetal development and in the opinion of UK and US law, oh and my opinion too) this is not actually possible. The fact that it will become a human, assuming nothing bad happens during pregnancy, does not mean that it is a human at this point. It's impossible to emphasise enough how utterly wrong, evil and stupid the idea of "life begins at conception" is.

You might also be interested to know that the vast majority of abortions in the UK are carried out before 12 weeks, well before a foetus could ever survive outside the womb.

Re: I thought is was...

Nope, just a regular sort of joke like the BOFH.

Re: this is silly

An ordinary GPU *is* enough. It took a lot less than a modern GPU to make the FX for everything from Tron to T2. Something with the same spec as WETA Digital's setup for the first LotR film is within reach for a keen and well-heeled amateur. The crucial ingredient is time. Halo doesn't look like Avatar simply bcos playing Halo needs a new frame at least every 100ms, and at that it's pretty ropey. But if you're rendering CGI, it doesn't matter if each frame takes a week to generate - you can generate frames a week at a time and print them as they arrive. The only questions are how long you want it to take for the render, and how realistic your CGI models are (both of physical items, and of laws of physics).

Re: Why somewhere else?

But if it came from somewhere else, how did *that* get started...? Either it's possible to evolve life from building blocks, or it isn't. If it is, then all the building blocks existed on Earth so there's no particular obstacle. If it isn't, then someone outside the Universe set it up.

TBH, chirality is just one of the "why on earth is it like that?" evolutionary oddities, like the blind spot in the human retina. I've no argument with people looking for better reasons, but it's a mistake to think that "it just happened that way" is not an equally valid answer.

Re: Why does London need a TLD?

But if we're not looking at TLDs for Tokyo, New York, the SF/LA Bay area, etc., then why a moderately large mostly-suburban city in a fairly small not-particularly-important country?

Re: Ownership of data

Sure it is. But you have the question of what's "private" once it's left your PC. Most people would argue that a published website is "public". Public Facebook posts? Probably, too. Facebook posts to your friends only? Unsure. Facebook messages? Tricky - it's between two people, but the data is always held on a third party's machine. Emails? Even more tricky. Text messages? Or files shared across wireless networks? At what point do you need a search warrant, or permission for a wire-tap, or what else...?

Re: Headed Commodore and Atari yet forgotten

Simple reason - Apple and Microsoft are still around. The others aren't. With the exception of Tramiel, all the others were one-hit wonders. And Tramiel was a two-hit wonder.

None of them saw the need to sell their existing product *AND* build on that success sustainably. So Acorn died by not working sustainably, and Sinclair, Commodore, Amstrad and Atari died by producing a load of shite that no-one wanted.

Yeah, just you.

Colonists part wasn't strictly necessary, but it was good scene-setting. We got to see a base which *wasn't* just bullet-scarred dark tunnels, which made how it looked when the marines got there more significant.

More time with Ripley after she's revived, adjusting to a world where her daughter has grown old and died without her, and where everything she knows (she's a pilot and a techie, remember?) is obsolete.

The automatic guns scene worked for me. Always wondered why the aliens didn't just come in the front door. Now I know.

Significantly extended final battle with the alien queen. The part where the two break apart and circle round each other looking for weaknesses is superb. It shows the alien *is* smart, not just a shark with legs. And that makes it a duel, not just a brawl.

More chat with the marines and Ripley, hence more character. The marines had a lot of shooting and dying to do, but precious little character. Even the most vocal ones (Hicks, Hudson, Vasquez) were fairly 2D.

Newt isn't just an annoying little kid, she's clearly traumatised *and* she's a survivor with important intel for the marines. She gets more to do than just run away and scream. And she's important for Ripley, who's only recently "lost" her actual daughter.

And Bishop gets more time too. The original didn't make much out of Bishop's android-ness. The extended version does.

So yeah, fraid it's probably you. ;)

Not really - steam engines were an entirely-British invention. Sure, if the Brits hadn't done it then someone else would have later, but it was Brits every step of the way. Savery came up with a first draft but never got it working, Newcomen got it working for pumping mines, Watt made major improvements for serious industrial use, Trevithick upped the pressure to make the engines smaller and more efficient (and hence suitable for locomotives), and the Stephensons got railways working properly.

Oh god no. I'd forgotten that. We watched it in the cinema too, and that really was awful.

They do have some reserves though, else a leak would be game over. And when you're on your way down, by definition you don't need those reserves - either you come down in one piece and can pop the hatch for some fresh O2, or you come down in a lot more pieces and then you're pretty well ventilated anyway.

Re: "I had this idea that life would adapt to the deep"

Falling nutrients are *not* necessarily gobbled up by things higher up. What happens to a whale carcass falling to the ocean floor is a great example of that. Sure the whale carcass is going to fall through a whole lot more water to get to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, but most of the noshing action happens when the carcass has hit the ground, not as it descends. And the "sludge" kicked up by the submersibles will be pure nutrients - dead stuff drifting down from above.

The heat is the more pressing problem (even more so than the pressure itself). Life probably can make itself at home there, but only under conditions (becoming relatively large and moving veeerrrryyyy ssssllllooowwwwlllly) which minimise energy expenditure. So complex life, and in particular predatory life, are not likely to be happening.