Oldest commercial reactor maybe? There's a research reactor at Penn State that first came online in 1955. Bet that little fact makes the neighbours proud...
Some sort of combination of a conveyor belt, a hatch on the top of the fuselage, and a really big funnel, would seem to be in order. Maybe some sort of compactor system inside the plane as well, for maximum packing efficiency.
It's more or less true, but it's not new research or anything, it's been known for decades if not centuries. V in classical Latin (ie the kind that the Romans spoke) is usually (always? not sure) pronounced as an English W, so "veni vidi vici" would be pronounced "wenni widi wiki" (C's are hard IIRC, so a K more than CH, which sounds more Italian to me). Between church Latin and English pronunciation we get a lot of Latin words wrong -- so "Caesar" should itself be pronounced "kye-sah" rather than "see-zar".
Of course it's been over 20 years since I last took a Latin class, and I was like the second-worst student in that class, so no doubt I've got some things wrong too...
No, Operation Mo was for the occupation of Port Moresby, not Australia. (Coral Sea was the outcome of the actual attempt to carry out Mo.) I'm sure the naval staff did consider a follow-on invasion of Australia after Mo. Military and naval staffs make plans all the time: it's their job to be prepared. It's not the same thing as having the intention to carry out those plans. Example: when the US Great White Fleet visited Australia and New Zealand in 1908, its officers made plans for the attack and invasion of their host cities -- they're still in the archives of the Naval War College. It doesn't mean they ever had the slightest intention of carrying them out; it was just a training exercise. Obviously the IJN plans were much more than that, but it's still not the same as intention.
As for the bit you quote, that's just the author's opinion. Whoever wrote it quotes extensively from Frei on that page, yet none of the quotes are conclusive. If Frei does provide 'very clear evidence', then why isn't it quoted?
The answers.com page is just an old version of the Wikipedia equivalent, which is considerably slimmer now. No doubt because just about every claim in there is unreferenced! Not persuasive.
There's still Japan's lack of capability to carry out an invasion, btw. The idea of a successful Japanese invasion of Australia is just silly. Look at what actually happened. By March 1942 the initial Japanese offensive had run out of steam, and the few offensive thrusts they made thereafter failed. And they were for far more limited objectives than the conquest of an entire continent! (Eg Guadalcanal.) Maybe the Japanese could have had better luck, but basically they'd reached their strategic limits by then. So aside from the fact that there was no intention and no concrete plans for invading Australia, it just would not have been possible to carry it out successfully.
OK, I'll take that back: I should have said "no realistic plans". Two divisions for the whole of Australia is hardly credible. There was no railway line to Adelaide in 1942, unless they parachuted in at Alice Springs -- the line to Darwin was only completed a few years ago. And imagine the attrition rate marching through the desert for a couple of months! It's nearly 3000km; there'd be nothing left by the time they got to Adelaide, even if they'd met no resistance. It's a ridiculous plan.
This site (which supports the idea of a Japanese invasion plan) has a slightly different story: Nagano instead of Yamamoto, 3 divisions instead of 2, limited objectives (occupation of Darwin and the north, no drive south). That seems more plausible but it also wouldn't lead to the conquest of Australia. But that site does a lot of reading between the lines, it seems to me; there was a lot of competition between the Japanese Army and the Navy and some of it was just political, ambit claims, not realistic planning.
Anyway, my larger point remains: at no time was an invasion of Australia ever a concrete Japanese plan (in the sense of something which at some point in time was intended to be carried out, rather than just a vague proposal), and they never had enough resources for the job. Yes, Australians stopped the Japanese at Kokoda; but they didn't stop the invasion of Australia, because that was never going to happen. (Or rather, if it did, it would quickly have become a disaster for the Japanese, and conversely a major victory for the Allies.)
It's worth emphasising though, both America and Britain initially wanted to abandon Australia, and allow us to be occupied by Japan. If it wasn't for Curtin's leveraging of those two divisions, it'd likely have happened
Hardly. Japan never had any intention of invading Australia: no plans for such were ever made, other than occasional speculations by junior officers. More importantly, it didn't have the logistical capability to sustain such a huge operation over such vast distances.
Thanks, that's what I was thinking of -- I should have gone with my original instinct then:)
I always liked Basic D&D (and Expert, don't think I ever got past there) for some reason, it dropped a lot of the clutter of AD&D and made it easier just to have fun. But it was frowned upon by most everyone else as kid's stuff compared with AD&D.
Come on. I've never played 1e, true, but I have seen the books for it. Elf as a class? What the hell is that?
I don't know, but it doesn't sound like the AD&D I played throughout the 80s (which is to say, 1e)... elf was a race, not a class. Popular at low levels especially because as non-humans they could be multi-classed. I thought maybe you were referring to Basic D&D but AFAICT elf was a race there too.
Well... either that or it will turn out to be something made up by 6 Washington DC lawyers like it is. I have a newsweek article with excerpts from the leading scientists of the 1970s that said we're all going to freeze to death.
In late 2005, Computing & Communications at the University of Washington began a project to create a new family of email tools built upon the Pine® Message System. This family of tools is called Alpine. Alpine consists of a UNIX command-line program, a PC version, and a Web version.
Alpine will be licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
The target date for the release of Alpine is October 1, 2006.
Obviously they didn't meet the target date, but if you can't live without pine it looks like it's still going to be around, and more sensibly-licensed too.
All this crap about just leaving them alone and they'll leave us alone reminds me of Arthur Neville Chamberlain. That sucker actually thought he had brokered peace with Hitler. A year later german tanks were rolling into his home town.
OK. The Munich agreement was signed in September 1938. So, are you saying that the Germans occupied Birmingham in September 1939, or are you saying that Neville Chamberlain was actually Polish?
Wait... there's a My Little Pony game? Sweet! What are the system requirements?:D
Seriously, a B5 space combat sim was in development by Sierra, but they pulled the plug in 1999, months before it was due out. You can see what it was going to be like here. But see also the main Firstones page for other signs of hope.
Well, I don't really see that as a premise, as it's actually contrary to the thrust of the rest of the article. It's more of a hook to draw the reader in -- a rhetorical device, which is why I paid no attention to it. But as it's what you were talking about in your comment, I withdraw my snarkiness.
If you had actually RTFM, you couldn't have gotten the stupid idea that the Economist writer thought Asimov's laws were foolproof...
So where does this leave Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics? They were a narrative device, and were never actually meant to work in the real world, says Dr Whitby. Quite apart from the fact that the laws require the robot to have some form of human-like intelligence, which robots still lack, the laws themselves don't actually work very well. Indeed, Asimov repeatedly knocked them down in his robot stories, showing time and again how these seemingly watertight rules could produce unintended consequences.
Re:It should be a lot cheaper than in the 60s.
on
Back to the Moon
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· Score: 1
I'm as big a fan of space exploration as anyone. But half of these are not attributable to the space race. Integrated circuits were first proposed in 1952. Teflon was invented in 1938, fuel cells in 1838 - yes, in the 19th century! I'll grant you satellite communications and weather forecasting, but also note that these did not and do not depend upon manned spaceflight.
Yes, but the point is, it's only 1 machine. You can't meaningfully extrapolate from your experiences with 1 Sun, no matter how much you paid for it. Sure, I understand that you are hardly going to commit to buying more Suns based on your experiences, but still you can't be sure your experience is not a statistical outlier. That's why when people who've rolled out hundreds of these machines tell you that Suns aren't that bad, you should at least recognise that perhaps you were just unlucky with that particular machine.
(Myself, I'm in the middle, have managed a few dozen Suns over the years, from SPARCstations and IPCs up to Blades and E3000s and I would say they are very reliable. A bit too reliable perhaps... if they don't die there's no pressure to replace them, so we end up with a lot of ancient and slow Suns around the place!)
Slashdot Mirror
Oldest commercial reactor maybe? There's a research reactor at Penn State that first came online in 1955. Bet that little fact makes the neighbours proud ...
Some sort of combination of a conveyor belt, a hatch on the top of the fuselage, and a really big funnel, would seem to be in order. Maybe some sort of compactor system inside the plane as well, for maximum packing efficiency.
Oh yeah, I got the Galaxy Explorer too -- maybe even for the same Christmas! Probably the awesomest present I've ever received.
In fact, forget the blackjack.
Of course it's been over 20 years since I last took a Latin class, and I was like the second-worst student in that class, so no doubt I've got some things wrong too ...
I've read that there's still an annual, nation-wide siren test in Switzerland.
No, Operation Mo was for the occupation of Port Moresby, not Australia. (Coral Sea was the outcome of the actual attempt to carry out Mo.) I'm sure the naval staff did consider a follow-on invasion of Australia after Mo. Military and naval staffs make plans all the time: it's their job to be prepared. It's not the same thing as having the intention to carry out those plans. Example: when the US Great White Fleet visited Australia and New Zealand in 1908, its officers made plans for the attack and invasion of their host cities -- they're still in the archives of the Naval War College. It doesn't mean they ever had the slightest intention of carrying them out; it was just a training exercise. Obviously the IJN plans were much more than that, but it's still not the same as intention.
As for the bit you quote, that's just the author's opinion. Whoever wrote it quotes extensively from Frei on that page, yet none of the quotes are conclusive. If Frei does provide 'very clear evidence', then why isn't it quoted?
The answers.com page is just an old version of the Wikipedia equivalent, which is considerably slimmer now. No doubt because just about every claim in there is unreferenced! Not persuasive.
There's still Japan's lack of capability to carry out an invasion, btw. The idea of a successful Japanese invasion of Australia is just silly. Look at what actually happened. By March 1942 the initial Japanese offensive had run out of steam, and the few offensive thrusts they made thereafter failed. And they were for far more limited objectives than the conquest of an entire continent! (Eg Guadalcanal.) Maybe the Japanese could have had better luck, but basically they'd reached their strategic limits by then. So aside from the fact that there was no intention and no concrete plans for invading Australia, it just would not have been possible to carry it out successfully.
OK, I'll take that back: I should have said "no realistic plans". Two divisions for the whole of Australia is hardly credible. There was no railway line to Adelaide in 1942, unless they parachuted in at Alice Springs -- the line to Darwin was only completed a few years ago. And imagine the attrition rate marching through the desert for a couple of months! It's nearly 3000km; there'd be nothing left by the time they got to Adelaide, even if they'd met no resistance. It's a ridiculous plan.
This site (which supports the idea of a Japanese invasion plan) has a slightly different story: Nagano instead of Yamamoto, 3 divisions instead of 2, limited objectives (occupation of Darwin and the north, no drive south). That seems more plausible but it also wouldn't lead to the conquest of Australia. But that site does a lot of reading between the lines, it seems to me; there was a lot of competition between the Japanese Army and the Navy and some of it was just political, ambit claims, not realistic planning.
Anyway, my larger point remains: at no time was an invasion of Australia ever a concrete Japanese plan (in the sense of something which at some point in time was intended to be carried out, rather than just a vague proposal), and they never had enough resources for the job. Yes, Australians stopped the Japanese at Kokoda; but they didn't stop the invasion of Australia, because that was never going to happen. (Or rather, if it did, it would quickly have become a disaster for the Japanese, and conversely a major victory for the Allies.)
Thanks, that's what I was thinking of -- I should have gone with my original instinct then :)
I always liked Basic D&D (and Expert, don't think I ever got past there) for some reason, it dropped a lot of the clutter of AD&D and made it easier just to have fun. But it was frowned upon by most everyone else as kid's stuff compared with AD&D.
I don't know, but it doesn't sound like the AD&D I played throughout the 80s (which is to say, 1e) ... elf was a race, not a class. Popular at low levels especially because as non-humans they could be multi-classed. I thought maybe you were referring to Basic D&D but AFAICT elf was a race there too.
OK. The Munich agreement was signed in September 1938. So, are you saying that the Germans occupied Birmingham in September 1939, or are you saying that Neville Chamberlain was actually Polish?
linky
What part of "My parents want to go legit, and buy a copy of Windows" don't you understand?
My sanity.
Seriously, a B5 space combat sim was in development by Sierra, but they pulled the plug in 1999, months before it was due out. You can see what it was going to be like here. But see also the main Firstones page for other signs of hope.
Actually, it's a testament to Andreas Katsulas' acting ability that this isn't true. All that latex and yet he still stole every scene he was in.
Well, I don't really see that as a premise, as it's actually contrary to the thrust of the rest of the article. It's more of a hook to draw the reader in -- a rhetorical device, which is why I paid no attention to it. But as it's what you were talking about in your comment, I withdraw my snarkiness.
So where does this leave Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics? They were a narrative device, and were never actually meant to work in the real world, says Dr Whitby. Quite apart from the fact that the laws require the robot to have some form of human-like intelligence, which robots still lack, the laws themselves don't actually work very well. Indeed, Asimov repeatedly knocked them down in his robot stories, showing time and again how these seemingly watertight rules could produce unintended consequences.
I'm as big a fan of space exploration as anyone. But half of these are not attributable to the space race. Integrated circuits were first proposed in 1952. Teflon was invented in 1938, fuel cells in 1838 - yes, in the 19th century! I'll grant you satellite communications and weather forecasting, but also note that these did not and do not depend upon manned spaceflight.
(Myself, I'm in the middle, have managed a few dozen Suns over the years, from SPARCstations and IPCs up to Blades and E3000s and I would say they are very reliable. A bit too reliable perhaps ... if they don't die there's no pressure to replace them, so we end up with a lot of ancient and slow Suns around the place!)
Hey ... you sound like you know what you're talking about. No fair.