Posts by alex870

81's 99 in 17: Still a lotta love for the TI‑99/4A – TI's forgotten classic

Parsec and speech were fun

I never really got into the Basic Interpreter for the TI-99/4A except for trying to invoke the speech synth. My friend had the TI, I had the BBC Model B. Once you used BBC Basic in anger, the rest of the Basic offerings from competing home computers of the era measured up pretty short by comparison. Using *LOAD to load a binary game, getting the memory addresses for *Save to write the binary out to cassette as a first generation copy. Good times for a 10 year old in the 80's!

Obama calls out encryption in terror strategy speech

Re: Re:Atheism is no more rational and theism.

Trevor_Pott:

>Atheism is about a desperate need to believe there is no god. They have no evidence.

Evidence to prove a negative? I trust you see the fallacy of that position.

I have a hard time accepting fantastically large claims without a shred of evidence. And further, where a large number of these fantastic claims are now provably false with scientific advancement. Want to bet that more religious claims of divine truth will not be debunked in due time?

I presume a minority of people have a pathological need to disbelieve, basically as contrarians. But the test for that is easy: these people would still not believe if shown scientifically rigorous evidence. This does not seem to be the majority position of Atheists, as you seem to think.

When you examine believers, there is commonly an emotional hook that compels them to believe. This is why they are impervious to rational discourse. Their decision to believe is not a rational one, but emotional.

Note that the reverse cannot be said (without ridicule). It is completely rational not to believe something that has no evidence.

Finally, my fraud detector goes off when people are selling an invisible product. No one is going to come back from the dead and say what it's really like. But, if you can remember what it was like before you were born, it'll probably be a lot like that.

Hey, do you remember how things changed in the middle ages? Neither do I.

Sign of the telly times: HDR shines, UHD Blu-ray slides at IFA

4K pipeline isn't ready yet

Most classic films or film from the 90's and earlier are barely able to crack 2K resolution with their film stock and lenses (under perfect conditions and modern stock, you can get just over 3K on super 35. Real world results can be much less).

A favorite digital camera currently used now is the Arri Alexa: 2.8K native. Most VFX pipelines are still 2K. 4K VFX is embryonic. Digital intermediates are still commonly 2K, and 4K only really got started in 2014. Take a look at imdb's technical specs to confirm. Even though Sony has been almost giving away their 4K projectors to theater chains, the DCP file being shown is still 2K in most cases.

2015 is looking like the year they're almost getting up to 4K native in the production pipeline. Even if they did deliver UHD blu-ray, the results might be somewhat underwhelming still.