The deep irony of the obsession of some Christian s with the 10 Commandments is Matthew 22:34-40:

But the Pharisees, when they heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, gathered themselves together. One of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, testing him. "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?"

Jesus said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the first and great commandment. A second likewise is this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments."

That's what a Christian is supposed to remember.

I second the laziness comment, the initial footage is from Joe Kittinger's 30km jump (see it here http://youtube.com/watch?v=P_9QHBMJdrI the jump occurs about a minute into the clip). The rest looks like your standard issue Warren Miller/Endless Summer surf footage.

I do like the incongruity of the intensity of jumping from 30km, or surfing a 15'(4.5m I guess to keep it metric) break and the ambient guitar sound.

That said, shouldn't one have to put some effort into the visual imagery, like touch it up, or collect it yourself or something?

I suppose I got a different impression of the ad, and it may be because I am the intended target. For those of us who travel from or through Europe to parts of Africa relatively regularly Sabena was a godsend because it serviced more of the "out of the way" countries like Uganda than any other major airline in Europe.

After Sabena folded and for a while was part of Swissair (I believe that agglomeration also folded) I regularly received missives from their frequent flyer program informing me I could still use my miles. So I don't think the positioning of the ad or the use if lions was in any way unintentional, SN is explicitly trying to recall its glory days as the premier European carrier to Africa, and trying to remind its erstwhile customers of that fact.

By the way I'm well aware that other carriers fly to Africa but most of them tend to fly to wherever their host nation used to have colonies, plus the most stable African locations: somewhere in South Africa (usually Johannisberg or Cape Town), Cairo, Nairobi, Lagos and Accra. Travel to anywhere else usually meant one or more connecting flights on cramped turboprops or small jets. The last time I flew Sabena there were a grand total of two European airlines serving Entebbe, British Airways being the other, and the price difference in tickets was almost always in Sabena's favor.

I second the idea that Python can replace BASIC as a beginner's language. It is interpreted, so like BASIC you can follow it "line by line".

In general, any programming language which can be run in an interpreter, one statement at a time, could be used for this role, those languages that don't teach the bad habits developed by BASIC are preferable.

You could use Haskell (the HUGS interpreter is available for free but it's probably a bit too weird for first time programmers), FORTH (which will inculcate even worse habits than BASIC, free interpreters are available though and it's very similar to assembly language programming), Scheme (last I checked the language of choice for educating programmers at MIT, and for which many free interpreters exist) or Squeak (which was created with pedagogy in mind and like LOGO makes graphics programming trivial).

If you are looking for BASIC specifically, then you'll have to pay, but even modern BASIC like Visual BASIC or realBASIC (available for Windows and the Mac) have removed some of the more egregious aspects of BASIC such as the dependence on line numbers and the associated tendency to produce spaghetti code riddled with GOTOs. They also have added some object oriented features, and object orientation has largely superseded subprograms and global state variables (another sin of BASIC but shared by many languages) so there is no point in not starting on an object oriented language to begin with.

There's no reason to discard current languages as too modern, anymore than you'd teach budding auto mechanics about carburetors, rather than how to diagnose a modern fuel injected system.

The reason the booster has parachutes in the first place is so they can be recycled, the boosters are picked up after launch, refilled with fuel and used again.

I believe the nose cone is not recycled, and I don't know about the parachutes but they are probably biodegradable anyway. In the right part of the ocean the nose cone would just turn into part of a coral reef anyway so that's not too bad.

NASA does a lot of silly stuff, if you ask Prof. Robert Park of the University of Maryland, College Park he'd tell you the shuttle itself is pretty silly. But aside from the noxious fumes released by the boosters at launch, this is one of the aspects of the shuttle program to be happy about.