after a semi at 69 Cock Lane was up for sale.
Well, half-way up, anyway...
4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010
like I understand that "Shouldn't of" is becoming common
Ah, now there, we are in complete agreement!
Those who use shouldn't of or couldn't of should be hung, drawn and quartered with a blunt knife. It is an abomination unto Nuggan.
the author is using a turn of phrase they don't really understand.
I rather think the author is using a turn of phrase you don't understand.
From the page you linked to...
The initial meaning of the phrase was to describe something which was partly good but which was ruined by its bad part.
It's now more often used just to describe something that is partly good and partly bad.
With regard to your point about the "Night Mode" Hill shot, In my experience, with a long exposure shot, even on a top-of-the-range SLR or DSLR, you would get the problem of the sky appearing too light, as it reflects back the street lighting.
I would not consider this to be a problem of the specific software, just the limitations of the location.
Radio-controlled aircraft, helicopters, boats etc have been around - and easily available off the shelf - for at least 30 years, and nobody's given a shit.
The task to make one of them able to deliver a terrorist payload is no different to that involved in modifying a quadcopter, and in fact most R/C aircraft have a much better range than your average "drone", so why is it suddenly a problem?
What do you do for email? Run your own server?
Well, as it happens, yes, I do.
But for my Hotmail I use Thunderbird, instead of webmail, so I can download all my mail from that account to a local machine, and then I can back it up on a USB drive as well.
All my important email goes there. I would be screwed if I lost that account.
and
Issues like this are precisely why I don't trust the cloud.
Sorry, these two statements do not marry up. If you don't trust cloud services why the hell would you trust your important email to a Hotmail account??
doesn't produce any tech relevant to real space travel.
Whilst I agree with your main point, that Branson's primary goal seems to just be about giving rides to rich tourists, I think the principle of an air-launched second stage is one worth pursuing as an alternative to ground to space rocketry, which (with the exception of Reaction Engines) is what everyone else is doing.
It has some of the most iconic music ever written.
Which were all pieces from classical composers. None of it was written for the movie.
Both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones scores were written by John Williams, who unashamedly borrowed themes from Holst, Strauss, Dvorak, and Bach (among others) to create his music.
I'm still waiting for "Rendezvous with Rama" to hit the big screen
Agreed, but unfortunately I don't think the original story has enough sex and violence to appeal to Hollywood, and I shudder to think what an "adaptation" would turn out like.
Probably like I Robot - only the title remains.
This prologue indicated a direction far less trippy than the final version. But 2001 just kept getting longer so the footage was never used and is presumed lost – although based on Kubrick's well-known obsessive cataloguing of research materials, it is sure to be stashed safely somewhere.
It was my understanding that Kubrick explicitly ordered the archive to be destroyed on his death.
I can't remember where I read that, though, unless it was Clarke's book.
I'm going to go out on a limb here but wasn't HAL's behaviour almost supernatural to what humans can understand? i.e. he was under the control of the monolith or in contact with it.
No, that only happened in the sequel 2061, after HAL had been physically destroyed at the end of 2010.
In the original 2001, both book and film, his "psychosis" was due to conflicting instructions in his programming.
The article (and some previous commentards) seem to make no distinction between arteries and veins.
In all but a few extreme cases, it is normal to take blood from, or inject drugs into, a patient's veins, and NOT the arteries. The name sort of gives it away really, it's an Intravenous injection, or IV fluids that are given.
Unless you are doing something clever like blood transfusion or dialysis, you would not deliberately stick a needle in an artery.
@David 164
Nope they are being tested on London roads, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfRqNAhAe6c
In case you missed it, that video shows a car which had to have a driver who was fully engaged in watching the road, and twice in the course of the video (10 minutes?) he had to take manual control.
Not very autonomous, is it?
Yes, it's a question I've pondered before. A datacentre that we use in Derby boasts of multiple redundant fibre links, but whilst that may be the case at their site, all the fibres go through the same telephone exchange in Colyear Street, and that building only has one ductway and cable room, so at that point all the fibres are in the same duct.
*If* we take the video on trust, then the car was being driven with dipped headlights which made it difficult for the human driver to spot the pedestrian.
Don't take the video on trust, it gives a wholly misleading impression of the lighting conditions.
See here for a more realistic view:
Using dipped headlights was entirely appropriate in the circumstances: the area where the accident happened is well lit with street lights and the human driver would have been able to see the pedestrian for at least 400 yards, probably more.
Others driving the route at night (without artificially dark video) have shown that a pedestrian should have been visible long enough to make a graceful stop.
Exactly. See here
There seems to be an erroneous belief centered on the Uber video that the accident happened in the dark, whereas the fact is it the road was well lit.
You have absolutely no way to know that.
The facts are that contrary to the widely held belief, the place where the accident happened was not a dark country road, it was a well lit urban street. The video footage released by Uber shows a very misleading view of the available light levels.
If you look here then you might begin to understand that the pedestrian would have been in plain view for a long time before the accident.
You are just making assumptions, when facts are needed.
No, I'm actually looking at the available evidence instead of accepting things at face value.
I'm thinking it occurred because SOMEONE WALKED IN FRONT OF A MOVING CAR AT NIGHT THAT HAD ITS HEADLIGHTS ON.
I'm thinking you're an idiot.
She was more than halfway across the road, which means she started crossing when the car was a long way away. The car was exceeding the speed limit, and so she probably misjudged the time she had to safely cross. She also probably assumed that the car would slow enough to let her get to safety as a human driver would do.
I timed the video and from when the pedestrian appears to when the video stops seems to be closer to 0.75 seconds rather than 2.
You cannot base any judgement on the video, as it is of such poor quality that it is in no way representative of reality. Human vision would have detected her much, much earlier.
Don't forget, the lady didn't just suddenly step out in front of the car, she had left the median strip and already crossed one lane, and was nearly half-way across the second lane before she appears in the video.
However, I agree that this shows that the either detection systems on the car were inadequate, or the software inexplicably decided not to brake or avoid the obstruction.
how many average drivers would have seen her?
Leaving aside the the problem that the human wasn't actually looking, if this had been a normal car with a human driver I would have thought that the chances are high that an average driver would have seen her.
The video shows that the camera didn't pick the lady up until the last minute, when she appeared in the full beam of the headlights, but then we know that video cameras are poor at resolving contrast in dark conditions, and the human eye is much, much better at resolving and identifying movement in those conditions.
When I first read of this incident, I sort of assumed that the lady had dashed across in front of the car, or had suddenly appeared from behind an obstruction. It is clear from the video that neither of these was the case, and I think an average driver would have seen her much earlier and taken avoiding action.
This very much looks like a failure of the car's detection systems, and not an unavoidable accident.