LosOjos

I'm just skimming through and there is some serious crazy going on here, if I worked at a big Comp Sci/Software firm near to this guy I'd be employing extra security for a while... Also, he has helpfully produced a document detailing the project's scripture correlation. I'm still none-the-wiser. Here's a great quote from aforementioned document: I genuinely think this guy has had a mental breakdown, there are lots of references to a woman who "tricked his mind" but he is thankful and has been "for over 10 years" hoping this will fix things... wife left him because he was going bible crazy perhaps?

Just seen this via the @KickstarterCrap twitter feed: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/290420897/computers-for-christians Can anyone make any sense whatsoever of this?

The bloke in the shop probably does get better* photos out of his bridge camera if he shoots in automatic, the point of going for an SLR-like is to have the control to take photos the way you want to, not the way the camera wants to. Another thing to consider is that the body makes no where near as much difference to IQ as the lens - compared to a cheap kit zoom lens, the bridge probably does take better quality photos as that lens has been manufactured exactly for that camera (it'll still never be as sharp as a prime though) whereas the kit lenses aren't great quality to begin with. YMMV. If you only ever shoot in auto, an SLR-like is overkill IMO. Call me a cynic but there's also the possibility there's a better markup on the bridge camera he was trying to sell to you. * better is quite subjective, I mean photos that he's happier with more conistently

[My SO's favourite joke] What's pink and fluffy? Pink fluff! What's blue and fluffy? Pink fluff holding it's breath!

Another +1 for Rufus! I used to use Unetbootin, but found it very hit and miss. Rufus hasn't let me down yet.

Happy Birthday

In that example though, only the light would arrive later, the physical entities involved (you and the ship) would actually already be there. Trying to do something like putting a wall in front of the spot you landed at before the light reaches it wouldn't achieve anything except making the light cast it's image on the wall - you'd already be there. So it's not time travel per sé, but the ability to see past events after the fact. Theoretically, if we could send a ship instantly to a position 65 million light years away equipped with a camera capable of focusing in on Earth from that distance, we could take photographs of living dinosaurs (I read a really interesting article on this (and why it's absolutely impossible - such a lens would have more mass than our solar system) via reddit a while back, shame I can't find it right now...)

Don't put too much weight in anything that happens in Interstellar - it's wildly inaccurate. [i watched it last week - I think it might be the second worst film (after Lucy) I've seen this year]

The ability to create and destroy wormholes at will without unraveling space/time then...

Glad you got it sorted

OK, just to be clear, intelligent life doesn't mean a life form that is capable of reading, writing and performing arithmetic. A dinosaur most definitely is an intelligent life form - a discovery of an animal of that complexity on another planet would be absolutely astronomical! (excuse the pun) How Do You Define "Intelligent Life"? — Emily Dawn Calandrelli

I understand the need to limit our scientific research (initially, at least) to search for only those kinds of life we know could exist on Earth as this is the only point of reference we currently have, but then when discoveries like the bacteria that survive solely on electrons are being made right here on our own planet, I really struggle to understand anyone who outright claims there is no life out there - I mean it's just so statistically improbable that we're the only inhabited planet that it's insane to me that anyone could doubt the possibility... then again, people have been known to make wilder claims EDIT: as for fossils on Mars @abillybob - we have never had the means to investigate the surface of Mars in the detail we are doing right now, so the fact we haven't found fossils is no surprise. It's highly unlikely we'll find any fossils that might exist with the rover up there now either, given the depth they tend to be found at and the fact it isn't looking for them. Who knows what future missions might reveal though - the first alien fossil would be a more incredible discovery than bacteria, as it'd likely prove intelligent life once existed on another planet

Don't fall in to the trap of thinking buying a more expensive camera will make you a better photographer; it won't. If you were happier with the IQ on shots you have taken on another camera then fair enough, but (assuming you don't just shoot in automatic) the shots are ultimately down to your own skill. I'm not saying this to offend, it's just a trap many fall in to that ends up costing them a great deal of money. There's not a fat lot of difference between the internal components of many of the manufacturers amateur/semi-pro range, what you're paying for much of the time is ruggedised and weather proofed casing, alloys rather than plastics. Lenses make much more of an impact on IQ. Rather than a new camera, why not book yourself on a couple of day courses in particular areas of photography you're interested in? Or look for local photo walks and meetups where you can chew the fat with other photographers - I found that much more valuable in improving my photography* than any of the various camera bodies I've owned. Oh and as we're talking about photography, the inevitable link to my flickr stream! Flickr * I'm by no means an excellent photographer but I definitely saw improvement

I shoot film too and you're right, they were built to last. I mainly shoot an OM2N, which wasn't even one of the more rugged SLRs, but it still works fantastically. Also have a Bronica ETRSi for medium format, not so much of a tank but a good shot with that blows my digital out of the water - just a shame film is so expensive to shoot now!

It sounds like exactly what you descrbed - there are only 4 blue house students, so position 5 is filled by the next highest student in the list - I believe it was me who helped you with this before and using the trick of setting hidden value to 0 to exclude them, right? The simplest way to fix it is to wrap each of your league table formulas in an IF, ending up with something like this: =IF(INDEX($C$3:$C$1380,MATCH(AA1409,$Y$3:$Y$1380,0))>0,INDEX($C$3:$C$1380,MATCH(AA1409,$Y$3:$Y$1380,0)),"") In plain English, this says "if the result of INDEX/MATCH is greater than 0, display the result, otherwise display nothing" You'll have to tweak the column number in your INDEX so that the first call (the comparison) always looks at the value column (to see if it is indeed greater than zero) but the second call returns the data you actually want from the correct column.

I'm in a similar boat to you, whilst on holiday last week my Canon 40D finally gave up the ghost. Going to see if I can fix it but I suspect it's just had it's day now (it was used very heavily by my grandad before he gave it to me so it owes nobody a thing!) I'm a Canon shooter simply because of my grandad; having Canon meant I could borrow his lenses and eventually he gave me the 40D I currently use. However, now I have the choice, I'm most likely going one of two ways: get a Sony dSLR (I've seen fantastic results from these and good glass seems to be available at much more reasonable prices than for Canon/Nikon) or go for a mirrorless. I had a mirrorless when I first got in to photography seriously, but hated it. However, they seem to have come a long way now and many photographers I know will admit their mirrorless systems get much more use than their dSLRs these days, some having dropped their dSLRs completely. If I go this route, I have heard nothing but positive things about Olympus. Might not help much but that's where I am at the moment!

Apparently overcast but warm - I can live with that. Taking little one to Disney World - she's super excited, I'm kind of stressed at the thought lol

My laptop turned up and to my surprise it had an NVIDIA GPU - win! Nothing fancy, but at least it might run!

About 12 from Manchester to Orlando - how about you?

Well I found an excellent Firefox add-on for this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/scrapbook/ Works behind login as it can use my session login to access the content. Win!

Can't as it is unable to access the OU site behind login (used it for other bits I needed though)

Yeah unfortunately, it's very hit and miss which modules are supported by it, and the one I have an assignment on isn't!

I'm traveling to the USA tomorrow and have some uni work I need to get done, but can't be sure of my connectivity. Would also like to get the bulk done in flight so I can just enjoy myself when I get there! I'm looking for a simple tool to download part of the OU's website for offline viewing (all their course material is online). Any recommendations? I'm currently trying WinHTTrack, but it seems to have gone too deep on the nested links and seems very slow. Also not sure how it's going to handle the OU website as I am required to login to that... I suppose thinking about it logically, some sort of browser plugin is going to be necessary - have access to FF/Chrome/IE. Help!

We did the political compass on here a few years ago, and at the time I must have had a quiet afternoon as I came up with this impression of the EduGeek political compass (based on those who posted their results in the thread): My result at the time was: My result today is: It seems a few years in a ConDem[ned] nation has pushed me further to the left

Calm down Vik! Might be against Capita's T&Cs but I don't think they'll have you arrested for it Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a way to set this centrally, and I really would not mess with the SQL backend, especially not for something purely cosmetic like this. If you accidentally overwrite the wrong field in the DB, the fallout could be catastrophic. Besides, how often do people sit looking at SIMS with nothing open?