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Plenty of folks have noted that Tatooine only had two suns, but nobody seems to recall that the planet depicted in The Dark Crystal had three, which reach close conjunction every thousand years or so:

When single shines the triple sun,
What was sundered and undone
Shall be whole, the two made one,
By Gelfling hand, or else by none.

You know, despite all the advances in CGI effects, 1982's The Dark Crystal still looks pretty darned good. Of course, a good story trumps fancy SFX every time (I'm looking at you, George "add some more banthas" Lucas).

I think you mean the i860....

http://www.dvo.ru/bbc/hardware/mbc100/hard/i860.ht ml
http://www.answers.com/topic/intel-i860
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/I/In /Intel_i860.htm

Some links for your general edification. Hope they help.

(and no folks, optical mice don't count because you could buy optical mice from other vendors before Microsoft had heard of them and put in an order).

YOu mean lawsuits like those filed by psychic (or is it psycho?) crackpot Uri Geller?

He has sued (and lost) book publishers http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/U/Ur /Uri_Geller.htm and Nintendo http://www.100megsfree4.com/farshores/ngeller.htm among others.

For years, one of Geller's favorite pastimes has been suing crackpot debunker the Amazing Randi http://www.randi.org/

The entire South Island is apt to be rocked by quakes from an extraordinarily mobile fault line that runs the length of the island.

BTW, in the first of the quakes in 1848 caused much damage to the fledgling capital. The inhabitants noticed that the wooden houses tended to survive whereas all the brick and stone dwellings fell down. Accordingly, the city was rebuilt in wood, except for one Baron von Alzdolf, who declared that the previous stone buildings were simply not built strongly enough---and was the only (or one of very few) person killed in the 1855 magitude 8.2 quake when his new, strong, brick building crashed on top of him.

"Sweden In Sweden military service is mandatory for men only. As of 2002, Quick Facts about: Sweden A Scandinavian kingdom in the eastern part of the Scandinavian PeninsulaSweden's government asked the army to consider mandatory army service for women. Less than a third of the Scandinavian country's eligible 19-year-olds are actually drafted each year. See Sweden considers mandatory military service for women.

Men may choose to do unarmed service, for instance as a firefighter. Generally unarmed service is longer than armed."

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/C/Co /Conscription.htm

I'm not saying that proves anything, nor do the other sites that had little snippets saying the same thing that I read before getting to that one. I'm just saying that if Sweden does not, in fact, require military service there are a grave number of people who are misinformed.

Orion has largely been replaced by Medusa; its pusher plate absorbs more of the energy, all of its structures are in tension (lightweight), crew is further from the explosions (less shielding), and it scales down better.

There are many fission-related engines. Offhand, I can think of solid/liquid/gasseous/plasma core, antimatter-catalyzed microfission (there's also microfusion - basically, you use a miniscule amount of antimatter in a trap to start a fission or fusion reaction), photonic rockets (you take the heat from a nuclear reactor and radiate it in one direction with a giant solar-sail-like device), fission-fragment rocket (you encourage particles to boil off the surface when they undergo fission; being ionized, you can control them magnetically), and nuclear saltwater rockets (one of my favorites. Dirty as heck, but the reactants have the energy to escape the solar system. Basically, you use a water-soluable uranium salt dissolved in water kept in neutron-absorbing capillaries. When you want thrust, you force it from the capillaries into a big thrust chamber, where it goes critical)

I thought Pamela would be the #1 virus celebrity ;)...

Reminds me of what happenned to the Kursk... in 2000. Hydrogen Peroxide was supposedly involved in the torpedo explosion that sank that puppy. See http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/R/Ru /Russian_submarine_Kursk.htm (before it's /.'d)

And the reason? Because Dvorak held the position before him.

And the reason? Because Dvorak held the position before him.

--
Evan

Yes, clearly machines running Smalltalk and LISP kernels never existed. And squeak developers are lying when they say its virtual machine is written in smalltalk.

And the reason why
for (x=0; x < 10000000; x++)
getpid();

takes 1 second due to system call overhead instead of 0.001 seconds is because C is such a great language for operating systems... hint: it's one instruction in a "safe" OS (ie not C/C++).

There is massive evidence of huge climate changes before Homo Sapiens emerged, with temperature changes at least ten times as high as has been observed though the last hundred years.

But life itself has changed our planet. Before life became established on Earth, and even for some one or two billion years afterwards, the air contained no free oxygen, but life changed this as photosynthesis produces oxygen as a waste product. Ironically, oxygen was poisonous to life at that time, but life evolved to cope with this poisonous gas.

you could probably use it for testing the HCF [halt and catch fire] instruction:
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/H/Ha /Halt_and_Catch_Fire.htm

I wonder if anyone knows how close we are to the power of the human brain yet.

How do measure the computational power of the human brain?

Here's a 6 year old napkin calculation.

They give a figure of 10^8 MIPS. Figure 1:8 for a MIPS:MFLOPS ratio. So ~13 TFLOPS.

The IBM Blue Gene/L is the current record holder at 135 TFLOPS. That puts it at the power of 10 human brains if that napkin calculation has any validity.

For average consumer computers...

The ordinary computer of Aug. 2004 performed 18,000 MIPS. Ref

Human brain power is ~12.44 Moore's law cycles away from that point. That gives 19-25 years.

So, your computer should be more powerful than your brain by 2030.

Whoever modded you up is being sillier then you.

Your explanation contains some of the same fallacies that the Parable of the Broken Window illustrates. Value and the flow of money are not always intuitively related.

Suppose for example the that state of Indiana can purchase a load of widgets from out of state for $1000 but if it purchases them in-state it costs $4000. The state of Indiana saves $3000 if it purchases them out of state and then has that money to spend on other items, whether or not those items are manufactured in-state or not.

Keeping money in the state is less important then maximizing value inside the state. For example, is the state better off it spends $4000 to buy one load of widgets from in-state suppliers or if it spends $4000 to buy 4 loads of widgets from out of state suppliers?

Of course these numbers were exaggerated to prove a point; however, the principle stands. Total value is much more important than simply tracing money flow.

Well Sweden is known for having the occasional problem with Trolls, Not to mention other nasties.
Troll [Categories: Nordic folklore, Dungeons & Dragons creatures, Norse mythology, Legendary creatures]

A troll is a member of a fearsome humanoid race from Scandinavian folklore
The mythology of Scandinavia (shared in part by Britain and Germany) until the establishment of Christianity Norse mythology the well-known Scandinavian folk tale Grendel in the poem The legendary hero of an anonymous Old English epic poem composed in the early 8th century; he slays a monster and becomes king but dies fighting a dragon Beowulf is a closely similar creature. The word "Troll" is possibly derived from an old norse word meaning Any art that invokes supernatural power, magic, cf. Swedish "Trolla", Danish "Trylle" (Perform magic tricks).

Trolls in Scandinavian folkloreAccording to a 1908 cyclopedia: "Trolls are Dwarf
A person who is abnormally small Dwarf Northern mythology, living in hills or mounds; they are represented as stumpy, misshapen, and humpbacked, inclined to thieving, and fond of carrying off children or substituting one of their own offspring for that of a human mother. They are called hill-people, and are especially averse to noise, from a recollection of the time when Thor
(Norse mythology) god of thunder and rain and farming; pictured as wielding a hammer emblematic of the thunderbolt; identified with Teutonic Donar Thor used to fling his hammer at them. A Scandinavian kingdom in the eastern part of the Scandinavian Peninsula Sweden there are many places that are named after trolls, such as the town Trollhättan (Troll's hood) and Trollkyrka.

Trolls are one of the most frequent creatures of Scandinavian fairy tales and more common than elves
An acronym for emissions of light and very low frequency perturbations due to electromagnetic pulse sources; extremely bright extremely short (less than a msec) electrical flashes forming a huge ring (up to 400 km diameter) in the ionosphere

Rotation and quantum spin aren't the same. See http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/S/Sp /Spin_(physics).htm for a nice reference. Quantum spin may not require dimensions, but rotation does. The article may have inadvertently confused spin and rotation.

The concept of the vortex as a one dimensional object does, on the surface (pun intended), make sense to me, though.

I was also under the (wrong) impression that gigabit was the good old binary thing, and that gibi was something they made to express decimal alternatives. And in fact I find out it's quite contrary, thanks to the parent poster. :)

Having repented, I point you to the this reference which does a very nice job of summing everything up.

Did you take a look at this this page?

It provides a pretty good write up on the types of funding available for open source projects, but the information can also be used in general for any type of project that needs financing.

Right, cause in the good ol' US of A they wouldn't come up with something like the DAT Tax or the Blank "Music" CD-R's (scroll down past the canada cd-r tax stuff).

I've never seen the show so I don't know a thing about it, but whenever I see the phrase "The OC" I think of OAC (Ontario Academic Credit) which is, or was, the fifth year of high school. So, this show was, in my mind, a show about a bunch of high school kids.

What is the show about, anyways (now that it's been mentioned on Slashdot a couple of times)?

I've read it and I can assure you that it is not even close to being right; it's almost pure mythology. Not even very good mythology at that.

Of course, if it was true then it would, by definition, be the oldest system instead of being a bizarre mis-mash of Sumarian, Babylonian, and even Egyption stories that it actually is. I particularly like the little bits the editors have missed like the strange references to Jehova's wife's priestesses, and Jesus's wedding.

My point is rapid rock formation can occur in a few decades, not just millions of years. So a dinosaur that died (shock, horror) 6000 years ago could have a bone embedded in sandstone.

That's true. I've actually stood at geological formations that were laid down in a day, never mind decades. Although it would have taken longer for them to solidify into hard rock.

Regardless, that says nothing about the age of a particular rock. So you say a sandstone bed might be 6000 years old. Why not 6,000,000? What is placing the upper limit on the age?

The the dictionary meaning of fossil just defines it as traces of organic life embedded in the earth's crust.

That's nice. But we are talking dinosaur bones and scientific terms, not dictionary terms. All fields of expertise have jargon which is more specific in that field than in general "dictionary english", the law is a classic example, but programmers, for example, mean something more specific by the word "memory" than the common user, who will often not diferentiate between RAM and hard drive space. Anyway, dinosaur bones do show mineralisation of the bone matrix, a process which takes a long time, so again you are trying to make a point about the upper limit by saying what the lower limit is.

Can you provide a link: I thought Carbon 14 is no longer absorbed once a living entity dies.?

Sorry, that's mostly true, I should have said " the background radiation in the test chamber", not "absorbed by the fossil". It's 3am here and I fluffed my memory roll!

There's a link here but there is information all over the place.

Radiocarbon dating has been very well calibrated back to 11000 years and quite well back to over 25000 years using tree rings, which I assume you think were planted there by your insane ju-ju spirit to confuse us. Not much point worshipping an obvious loony like that whether he exists or not.

TWW

Archimedes didn't even like the idea of irrational numbers.

You're thinking of Pythagoras.

Last I heard, the WOW signal was the first (accidental) detection of the RF beam that comes off a pulsar.

Different events - the pulsar was the LGM (="little green men") signal, in 1967. Link here

If i recall, the "Next Generation" console was called LCARS (Library Computer Access and Retrieval System) with the specifications (voyager):

Crew Interface Software: LCARS 2.3
Access Time: 4,600 Kiloquads/Second
Number of dedicated modules: 2,048
Capacity/Module: 630,000 Kiloquads
Simultaneous access to 47 million data channels Transluminal processing at over 8 trillion calculations per nanosecond
Operational temperature margins from 10 degrees Kelvin to 1,790 degrees Kelvin

The article talks about cell computing... that's so 2005.