champu

Tape quality doesn't affect error correction it just affects the initial error rate. The DV device doesn't care what tape you use, it's going to employ the same error correction (some crazy interleaved version of a Reed-Solomon code if my memory serves me correctly.) The reason I mention this is that you have to be careful with that 4dB number. Your final error rate isn't linear vs SNR even without ECC. With ECC, depending on the regime you're operating in, you may not see any meaningful change in final error rate. /edited to add: I neglected to mention the most important part, so if I may "nerd the thread up" even further... Errors on digital storage devices (CDs, DVDs, flash media, hard drives, DV tapes, IC registers, etc) are dominated by local non-linear effects such as physical damage like dust and scratches or erasure by exposure to magnetic fields (or, if you happen to be in space, what are called single event effects due to bombardment with high-energy particles like helium nuclei ) Increased SNR does you no good in these situations, which is why storage devices use things like interleaved Reed-Solomon codes (which are really good at correcting bursts of errors) as opposed to something like PCC codes or LDPC codes which are designed to better handle effects of data transmission through a noisy channel.

This photo is from a week or so ago. Fairly light winds but the jumper was landing a little bit crosswind. Started to reach for the ground (hence canopy is off to the right) but when he realized what he had done, went into a pretty good plf/roll. No style points, but he did a good job doing what he needed to do. Except of course the rule about, "not falling down when someone is pointing a camera at you."

No, shit. You wouldn't believe the trouble I caused when I put up a Nativity scene... You mean on your own property at home?? If so, they can all go screw themselves. "So maybe the particular nativity scene I constructed was a little more 'graphic' than people were used to, big friggin' deal!"

Give us a break, we're trying okay? Do you think it's more likely it will be found to have meaning in eV-seconds or in joule-seconds? I think numbers are more of a construct than a theory, conceptually inert in and of themselves. And "circuit theory" is somewhat of a misnomer. It's not really a theory, it's a set of approximations to Maxwell's equations (which happen to be pretty good so long as the structures you're dealing with are much smaller than the wavelengths you're interested in.)

I'd expound, but I'm somewhat preoccupied licking windows, trying to bite my own elbow, and figuring out what "the Horse says..." on my See n' Say.

Are the covers plastic or glass? plastic would be kinda silly and inviting scratches in the first place. Either way I'd seriously question the need. I have a glass 0.3x lens with no filter over it and after about 900 jumps, while the d-box near the camera lens and the metal bezel of the lens itself are thoroughly jacked up, the glass is in perfect shape. That said, buy the lens from someone who's going to talk to you. I've had mixed experiences with Max. With the first lens I bought from him I got the, "got the order" e-mail, "lens is shipped" e-mail, and received the lens all within a few days. The second time around (bought a 0.5x too) it took months, and communication wasn't very good. At the time he was the only one selling the really low profile lenses, but now that there are serious competitors out there he's going to have to step up the customer service.

Splitting hairs on a gnats ass about the learning and cost differences between AFF and S/L is a waste of your energy. Neither program offers benefits over the other that would be worth traveling 8x as far. Unless the closer dropzone is some kind of leper colony (and I've heard nothing but good things about Taft) you'd be wise to go their regardless of which training method happens to be their fortay.

"Originality is the art of concealing your source." -Franklin P. Jones Most traditions practiced these days were adopted from somewhere, absolutely, but you're not speaking to your original point anymore. The celebration of December 25th with a tree, gifts, a feast, and Santa Clause doesn't belong to Christians by right of practice any more than it belongs to your family.

That was a terrible post. The first statement you make is false, you've insulted the parent poster in a childish way by suggesting his point of view be subjected to an "idiocy scale", you've created an analogy that very much misses the point, and you've used onomatopoeia that degrades the mentally retarded... ...but hey, Merry Christmas!

My desire to be generally personable outweighs my desire to profess my stance on religion during the exchange of pleasantries this or any other time of year. Which, in more general terms, is not a difficult thing to outweigh.

A fellow penny-arcade fan? (for everyone else here's the rest of the set)

One of the closest calls I've had since I've moved out here was actually on the CA-91 when someone (who happened to be in a large SUV... *cough*) apparently got tired of sitting in the stop and go traffic and piled over the plastic barriers into the express lines right in front of me. A brilliant maneuver on his part but a reminder that anything even remotely resembling continuous pavement will be used as such by people regardless of how many lines you paint on it, or how many plastic barriers you put in the way.

Notice: please try your best not to construe the following post as an attempt to impose fines on things I may or may not dislike for hidden personal reasons by use of a front. Also, a response from an actuary may be in order to correct me if I'm wrong anywhere. okay... on with the post... Keeping in mind that E = (1/2)mv^2, and that if there's any correlation between type of car driven and driving ability in the average populace, it is extremely weak, wouldn't it make sense for graduated licensing and/or higher liability coverage to be carried by those who drive bigger and faster (more powerful) vehicles? I'm talking about within the very broad definition of what we call "passenger vehicles and light trucks." It seems there's a lot of studies done crashing cars into barriers and running impact rigs into the side of them to see how they fair in the event of an accident, but I think very little attention is paid to what they are, "bringing into the accident" so to speak. I would assert that large luxury sedans and many SUVs with powerful engines cause more damage and are more likely to injure people in the event of an accident than other vehicles. I guess my post can be summed up as a question, "is it a fundamentally different act to run a red light and t-bone someone while you're driving a 6000 lb SUV as it is to run the same red light at the same speed and t-bone someone while driving a 3000 lb car?" I think it just might be.

Hey, I like my Mirages and Katanas (and FF2 ) That said, my first complete used rig was freefly friendly, had about 400 jumps on the container, 750 on the main, a 3 year old cypres (which is the one I'm still using today) and cost me $3200. Buying all new gear at the time for $5000 wouldn't have gotten me anything "more." I also bought a protec for $35 when I first started and sold it a year later for $20 to a newer jumper.

If you get arrested, handcuffed, and put in the back of a police car that is parked on railroad tracks, I think you'd be on to something. But I would consider getting out of the police car a pass on the protection that may have come by remaining in it. I would equate the posted event roughly to trying to tunnel out of prison, digging into buried power lines, and electrocuting yourself.

My theory is simply that the more complex feelings of guilt, honor, love, etc. were arrived at through evolution just like the more simple and obviously beneficial feelings like hunger, physical pain, and sexual desire. Morals, as I've stated before, are artificial and highly circumstantial conclusions about what is right or wrong based on how a certain series of described events makes us feel. If you tell someone, "you shalt not steal or else you shall be plagued by guilt and burn in hell" enough times, they're going to feel guilty if they ever steal something. This shouldn't be a surprise, remember, you can ring a bell and make dogs salivate. This practice doesn't make the words "thou shalt not steal" any more fundamental, absolutely true, or even more profound than the sound of a ringing bell. Religion is a ringing bell that attempts to attach a bunch of stuff to feelings we've evolved as humans, and then tell us all that stuff is as fundamental as the feelings themselves. It works pretty well too, for the same reason religion works elsewhere: it placates the mind by explaining supernaturally what science hasn't yet. In this case, that those feelings we don't understand the evolutionary benefit of having were painted there by a higher power.

Sheesh. People might want to relax a bit, this is supposed to be a recreational activity. On one hand, yes, you're life will be nothing but easier if you're nice to manifest. On the other hand, the dropzone needs to be clear about rules like pull altitude, pattern direction, types of turns allowed, etc. when they hand you a waiver, not after people start complaining about you. As a side note, I suppose I'd also encourage up-jumpers to talk to newcomers if they see them do something rather than report them to manifest.

I think you're trying to personify evolution and suggest that it has or should have goals. It doesn't. Besides, abortions are a case where everything will work out perfectly! Those that choose, and don't feel any obligations towards their unborn fetus, will have an abortion and take one step back away from the gene pool.

For some reason I picture you pressing a large red button labeled "bullshit" causing dramatic music to play, the audience to gasp, and all the lights in the studio to pan back over to Billvon as camera 2 switches to him and a caption at the bottom of the screen reads, "Billvon, responding to a call of Bullshit" to keep the viewers at home up to speed. The former is addressing something someone has written here, and the latter is directed at the person themselves.

I normally wouldn't nit pick people's spelling but malapropisms are always funny... and btw, who are you calling "scantiest"?

I think, more specifically in the case of this article, it means breaking the cycle of asking questions and getting what I'll call "political answers." Answers that aren't necessarily lies, but that clearly dance around the truth. Rather than rephrase a question to try and coax just a little more honesty out of a person, only to get another political answer, you tell them in no uncertain terms that you won't accept their last answer because it was, "bullshit."

By gum, I think we're getting somewhere! I have absolutely no problem feeling that something is wrong (or right) and saying so without the comfort of having convinced myself that such a feeling is in line with a higher authority. Some people would have a problem with doing so, and while that's kinda strange to me, hey, what are you gonna do? For example, I'm making up my end of this discussion as I go along. I have absolutely no idea if it falls in line with anyone else's higher authority, or even if anyone that feels the same way has written a book about it. What can I say? I feel like I'm right!

Where some would take this opportunity to hide behind Godwin's Law, I will press on! It may be that I don't feel what he did was right, and you don't feel what he did was right, but he apparently felt what he was doing was right. What does that mean in terms of the evolution of feelings and achieving a moral absolute? Not a whole lot really. Only that evolution is not organized and "doesn't care" if it accomplishes anything; it just happens to over time.

If you try and understand the nature of morals by writing, "love your neighbor, honor your parents, thou shalt not kill, etc..." on a piece of paper, placing the paper on your desk, and banging your head against it until the words mean to you what you think the words meant to Jesus, you're not only wasting your time, you're also going to wind up with a headache. Morals are not subjective/objective so much as they are simply artificial. They are highly circumstantial conclusions based on what a person feels is right. That's why morals always seem to have a long drawn out story to go with them. Because the author has to set everything up, making sure the whole scene is just right, so that you will reach the conclusion at the end of the story that was intended. But not everyone is going to read every story and feel the same way. That doesn't mean there's a moral absolute embedded in the story and that some people, "get it" and some people, "don't get it." It means, as I said before, that what's "right" and "wrong" come directly from feelings that are evolving along with man, and they are no more concrete than we are as a species.

Perhaps because morals and theism came first and religions are attempts to make the idea of following morals more popular and formal by linking the two? I'd go even further to say the idea of morals and the idea that there is a "right" and "wrong" have been artificially formalized by man as well. Despite there being only a handful that we readily recognize as such (hunger, physical pain, sexual desires, etc.) it's quite probable that all feelings we experience are products of the evolutionary process. This is to include feelings one might claim stem from "having morals" such as faith, guilt, righteousness, and yes, even love. There is nothing more selfish than genes undergoing evolution, but when you look at a species like man that has come as far as it has only because of our ability to work together, you can appreciate why, over time, it would become beneficial to the individual to experience these feelings we attribute to the existence of morals. You can even observe glints of it in other fairly advanced species. I think a great many philosophers who try to understand the foundations of what could be considered right or wrong, believing such foundations are sure to exist because of a nearly universal set of feelings that go along with committing certain actions are barking up the wrong tree. What if the concepts of "right" and "wrong" are nothing more than a part of man himself, and are thus no more mature, let alone concrete, than man is as an evolving species? Talk about aiming at a moving target... The authors of religious texts have done no better in what started, no doubt, as a similar pursuit. They focused on a snapshot of "right and wrong," declared compliance to be mandatory, and backed it with supernatural retribution or reward. But the stories are full of contradictions and the arguments are full of logical fallacies. That is to be expected as the only thing my studies of religion have successfully taught me is that man truly is imperfect, as will be anything man creates. It has taught me this through, quite possibly, the most elaborate example of irony in all of history. The largest, most catastrophic, and unfortunately still ongoing failure of man to create something perfect is the concept of religion itself.