1 g would be perfect, but without a serious nuclear drive or orbiting laser cannon it ain't gonna happen. Now, accelerating at 1/100 g, or even 1/10 g, via an ion rocket... you start slow, but it adds up and you are MOVING after a few weeks. The solar system has been wide open for decades; ion rockets powered by nuclear reactors can move men to Pluto in a reasonable amount of time. I don't remember the exact figures, but ion rockets get you to Mars in weeks rather than months -- accelerating at a fraction of one g.
A smoking smear where the coastline cities used to be. After sixty nine storms, every sandy beach city lined with casinos would probably be wadded up and washed inland.
Nonsense. there is no such thing as a 'wrongful acquital'. You made that up. If the jury finds someone innocent, that's it, it's over, no second guessing by you. It's not 'wrongful'. There is no legal concept for what you just made up.
And it's about par with the idea of 'judicial activism'. The biggest self-determined opponents of such are on the Supreme Court, where they just last (?) week decided that Oregon had no right to legalize suicide even if the voters decide it is law. They overrode it, let's face facts here, because it offends their religion. THAT is judicial activism, and hypocrisy. JA is not a philosphy. It's a smear word used by those who want to shut down 'liberal' decisions. Right wing judge lawmaking is perfectly fine by their lights, because their Federalist Society judges are always right, and liberal socialist commie judges are always wrong.
Look at from the perspective of book lovers, who perennially chant, "But nothing will ever replace the feeling of a good book, of turning pages with my fingers, sitting in my parlour on my straw-filled wingback chair by the light of my coal oil lamp, while my cleaning girl washes my clothes in the river."
An eBook that looks like a book sounds idiotic to a geek, but will sell well to people who simply can't wrap their heads around a new idea. And teachers love to see their students loaded down with the weight of at least one heavy book, suffering as they have suffered, serves the little buggers right. "Tonight you will need your English, Algebra, Economics, Webster's dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia Brittanica and your school desk when you do your homework assignments." No wonder we bus them to school. No child could lift the weight of all those dead trees for half a mile both ways.
Of course, there's nothing political about private corporations, like say, Diebold? Maker of the voting machines you can set up to predetermine the winner of any race? Whose chief executive pledged to do what he could to deliver Ohio for Bush? Or ICANN, which was owned, or may still be owned, by the Carlyle Group, an invitation-only investment corporation up to its eyeholes in ex-politians. Tony Blair, for example, will get a seat and block of stock that will set him up for life when he retires from political life. Carlyle, hard-core rightist, invites members in as reward for service to their interests. How about Haliburton, whose CEO is sitting as Vice President (some say acting President) of the US, still being paid his bloody salary into a deferred account as billions pour into his company from no-bid contracts in Iraq and the Katrina Money-sucking Zone? Haliburton IS the US government!
EESSSH. In a corporatist world, what Mussolini dubbed a "fascist" government, there is no real distinction between private corporations and the elected government. There is NO DIFFERENCE between the political world and the business world. Business is politics times infinity. Actions without oversight, no personal responsibility, no penalties, and no limits to power. Government is just another department to the corporate world.
The UN is right. We're not to be trusted with the world's communications system. We don't care about the world. We are a mortal danger to their survival. You don't put a two year old solipsist at the controls of a train.
The high cost and low speed are not caused by high infrastructure costs, or low population density. The telcos and cable companies have plenty of cash to lay down fiber to the home. They spend it on acquisitions of competitors and huge payouts to executives. It's not a problem of population density differences between, say, Tokyo and New York. If that were the rule, NYC would have 10 dollar a month fiber connections for everyone in Manahattan. They keep the prices high because they can.
The difference between Japan and the U.S., between France and the U.S., between Canada and the U.S. is this: they still have a liberal social policy -- the concept of the public good. They spend tax dollars and regulate providers so that the cost of high-speed telecom stays very low indeed.
The U.S., in what can only be called the era of Bushism -- he didn't invent it, but he is the shining avatar of all that it embraces -- has gone Ayn Rand, and no longer has a core concept of the public good, with perhaps the exception of highways and of course the military. We don't have an emotional understanding of why regulation of commerce is needed, or why taxes sometimes should be spent to build things that private corporations simply will not provide at a reasonable cost.
After all, if you, in your car driving from your suburban home to your job, had to pay a private corporation to build and service every inch of asphalt from your driveway to your job -- how much do you think you'd be paying? Oh baby, I'm clenching thinking about it. Protect us, O Lord, from the thieves in the broad daylight...
They'd be the cheapest crappiest roads they could get away with. They'd lobby Congress to exempt them from liability from death and damage caused by baseline maintenance. Look at what happened in Ohio -- that massive electrical blackout was caused by a conglomerate cutting powerline maintenance beneath the bone to pump up profits. Private companies SUCK at that sort of thing. All the drive for higher profits at all costs. Since the people who actually run corporations have no personal responsiblity for their actions, they have no sense of same. Elected officials at least can go to jail, lose their jobs, be exposed as lying jackasses. Companies are faceless machines which just don't care. ESPECIALLY when they are monoplies. We practically fought a civil war to disable the trusts in the early 20th century for just that reason.
Most technologically advanced countries have good public health care, fast internet, and good highways because they still adhere to the concept of the public good overriding the possiblity of someone making an immense profit. It's as simple as that.
Seriously, every one of these "tests" will be used in the future by potential employers to screen job applicants. They won't be stopped, as if our government for the forseeable future will ever pass a law controlling what tests HR departments administer. The Supreme Court is being stacked with Federalist Society judges who will shut down attempts to circumsribe the freedom of corporations to hire and fire.
The hell of it is, along with just about every other test, including lie detectors and personality analyses (holy Dianetics, Batman) the test for these disorders are not failsafe. Hell, they might not work at all, or the eager beaver purveyors of these tests are misrepresenting what they are testing. Lie detectors are widely used, tho scientists have called them horsecrap for a half century. Drug tests have false positives, a monkey could walk around personality tests, and background checks rely on shadowy security companies who don't exactly keep their information current or accurate.
Another "test" that tests for, what, exactly? Some marker that current hypotheses deduce may or may not indicate anxiety disorder. But, like all the other tests, long after they are discredited, we have to march over to the testing lab if we want to get a job.
Anyone hear about fMRI's? Ah, the ultimate. Mind reading via MRI's! Oh, I can't wait for that crap to take off.
Follow the money. These tests are going to make screening companies billions of dollars. Whether or not they actually test anything in the real world is irrelevant.
And Americans will whistle and go along, because they have no imagination, no sense of their own history, no sense of what it means to be a free people. As if business is the only activity of mankind that deserves civil liberties.
Ya know, after downloading the Vividas plugin last night, I'm getting a java message reporting that my c:/ directory is corrupted, and wants me to run chkdsk. And Azureus has gone wonky. It wouldn't knock off the repetitive warning box until I shut down Azureus and my OpenOffice tray icon. Until I read your post, I didn't make the connection. Oy, don't tell me their code somehow accidentally messed up my java installation? Anyone else notice an error message after installing the plugin?
And before the 5.0 rated version is out and downloaded, everyone, please buy at least 50 million worth of tickets. The movie cost 30 to make, and the studios want to see at least 50 back to greenlight another sequel.
Last I heard, it was number one at ten million in gross receipts. Everyone, all together, let's see it four more times...
A person should always wait for a girl to reach 18, not because one would hurt her by having icky sex with her, but because our society is apeshit insane and would tear her and her older partner to shreds. So waiting until she's of age is just sanity in an insane world.
Of course, if everyone who'd had sex with an underaged partner were actually found out and prosecuted, the US would just become a giant prison complex full of lifers. I'd not be in there with the majority of y'all, but that's because I had a slow rampup to romance when I was young. I can't recall many teenagers I've known who didn't have an affair with an older man or woman at some time.
You don't think teenagers gain their advanced sexual skills from people their own age, do ya? Someone's teaching someone somwhere in the sexual food chain.
To keep a planet warm enough when it isn't in the habitable torus around the sun, you don't need to constantly generate heat; you just have to retain more heat than you radiate away.
We live on Earth because of this balance. To do it in the outer solar system, where an Earth would normally freeze solid, you adjust the insulation, as it were, by maintaining higher proportions of greenhouse gases relative to the remainer of atmospheric gases than would be safe in the inner solar system. Crank up the greenhouse effect, and keep toasty. High CO2 levels could be maintained by either terraforming machinery, or by keeping plantlife down (hence the desert conditions on the outworld planets! Aha!) to a precise miniumum to keep O2 levels proportionately lower realtive to greenhouse gases than normal here on Earth.
Now, the levels would be adjusted over time. When the moon/planet is first being defrosted, you'd have to raise the temperature a lot. Fusion plants fueled by deuterium or tritium culled from water ice would blast away for decades, just gererating huge amounts of heat -- giant plasma torches -- to get the whole setup's temperature down to a point a man could stand outside in a pressure suit without freezing solid in a frozen methane bath. After temps come down to a habitable range, pump methane and CO2 into the atmosphere in huge amounts, and let the greenhouse effect from trapped solar energy add heat to the mix. Adjust the fusion-powered torches to adapt to the increase in heat retention caused by the atmosphere, until the day they aren't needed anymore.
After your stable CO2 atmo is warm enough, you start adding plants and bacteria to start a photosythesis cycle. Water would come from melted ices as the atmo warms up. Add animals, earthworms, selected insects, seeds, stir and simmer. Then dump your wretched refuse from the Core planets to populate the place, at your set wages. Wait for revolt, shoot, then simmer again...
Oh yeah, light levels. Actually, even if the solar radiation were only one hundredth as intense as it is here in Earth's orbit, to human eyes it would look much the same. A room with a ten thousand watt bulb would blind you, even if the sun at noonday would be a thousand times more intense. It's hard to accept, but a sunlit terraformed Titanian sky, in orbit around Saturn a billion miles from the Sun, would look exactly like a summer day in New York to your senses, only 93 million miles from the sun.
In the movie, Joss states that there are eighty (80) terraformed worlds in that solar system.
It's possible, I guess. If you look at the figures on discovered extrasolar planets, they of course are all superJovian monsters. SuperJovians may have Earth/Venus-sized moons by the dozens, waiting for someone to come and terraform.
Let's see, use nuke plants to power gas generators that process raw materials of the planet's surface and atmosphere to release oxygen and nitrogen; add carbon dioxide or methane for a greenhouse gas; get some genetically engineered bacteria to jump start a CO2/O2 cycle; oops, don't forget water, lots of it; get some genetech plants and animals on the ground to start a bioshpere; and earthworms. Earthworms are key for turning the soil.
On an icy moon, methane, water ice, frozen CO2 and nitrogen are available by the megaton lot. On worlds more rocky and possessing fewer available volatile elements, crash land some frozen comets composed mostly of the elements needed to start a biosphere. The impact alone would melt a few million tons of gases to get things going.
Okay, we've got a new solar system with Terra-size moons around SuperJovian planets, moons big enough to be called planets if they could orbit the central sun without getting captured by the gas giants. This works. And you don't even have to be in the habitable zone of the solar system to get enough warmth to survive -- the greenhouse effect can be adjusted so that the atmosphere retains far more heat than would be possible on Earth, because of the issues with ice caps disappearing and the ecosystem going blooey. The trick would be dicey, and expensive. Those would be the outer worlds, the worlds where the poor and the down-and-out would migrate to from the core, easy-to-maintain core worlds.
In a solar system scaled to superJovian orbits, the distances betweeen worlds could range from a half billion to ten billion or more miles as the space crow flies. Our solar system would be a blip there, a midget.
Okay, that down, I'd have to say that Whedon has never said that there weren't interstellar craft. The Core may well have a few, and that would be another tale, ripe for the telling. Maybe the star hops are done with antimatter photon rockets -- and antimatter would be pretty damned expensive to make. Antimatter rockets could accelerate for the standard year at one gee until speed is c minus a hair, do the flipover, and decelerate at one gee for another year. Due to the famous relativistic effect, the closer you push your speed to c, the more time "slows down" for the ship relative to the frame in which it travels. So four light-years or four hundred, it's pretty much always a two year jaunt, with the majority of the trip spent in hyperslowed time. The "galaxy" that Joss speaks of may well be experiencing the arrival of thousands of starships launched from the Core planets, tho the subject may not be a daily concern to the poor outbackers of the solar system in which the Serentity's crew cruises.
The world of Serentity may be far more complex and fun that we know yet.
Hey, Joss, gimme a call, I can get you out of this mess:)
The "cluestick" is that Microsoft keeps subverting open standards so's everone must buy their buggy software. To do this, they abuse their monopoly, which should have been broken up when the US wont the case in court five years ago. But Bushists dropped the ball, wink wink, and now here we are.
To accept the lesson of the cluestick, we have to accept Microsoft as our lord and master. We might as well shut down comp sci courses and let Microsoft become computer science. All hail Redmond, the source of all that is clueful and proper.
Eh, I'm off to bed. America, get electroshock treatment. You're in a neocon coma.
You're a settler on a newly inhabited planet. There's a job shortage, and you barely make any hard cash to buy bread with, much less hovercraft.
You'd be wealthy if you owned a horse, some oxen, a henhouse and a corrugated aluminum shack to live in whilst you raised fungus-y tomatoes. You'd be RICH if you could save up the money to buy a shotgun.
The people who own the factories that make hovercraft are the people who can afford lasers, hovercraft, and decent cops. In the Serenity world, there just isn't really all that much wealth in the outback.
Camels are self-fueling, and have the advantage over machinery in that they can flawlessly make new camels to replace themselves when they wear out. Ditto all the other low-tech in Serenity. When you dump a million people on a newly-terraformed world, you don't give 'em diesel tractors: you give them horses.
Whedon simply didn't get the difference between a solar system, a group of stars with solar systems, and a galaxy. He may have been straightened out later.
I was butting my head on this for a while: after all, if the new solar system was colonized by Earth, then - bloody hell! - they had interstellar drives. For hundreds of millons of passengers.
But the series never shows anyone making star hops. They're all fusion rockets, and they only travel a few million miles, spending weeks or days en route. Probably deuterium/tritium fueled.
What happened to the mighty starships? What happened to the Terran supertransports? And didn't anyone read "The High Frontier" on Earth? Why go to another star and terraform planets when you can stay around our solar system and build land areas in habitats with congomerate land area millions of times that of Earth's surface?
The confusion rattled me after I figured out that Serenity wasn't a starship. If the author can't figure out the difference between a solar system, a group of stars WITH solar systems, and a galaxy of Earths, he ain't writing science fiction -- he's using the form instead. Sci-Fi instead of SF. With the caveat that his universe doesn't make any sense.
However, I ignore all that and love the movie. I just wish they taught astronomy in writing classes.
We've been videotaping their shows for twenty years. Have we been jacking their creativity for two decades? Are they showing any signs of damage from the VCRjacking of their shows?
Occurs to me that Google has no choice but to try to become Microsoft's death.
Microsoft had already long decided to kill Google. They've a Google-killer search engine, a maps adjunct, all that. They want Google dead, and being a monopoly, they can use dominance in their OS and Office products to spend any competitor to death.
But, Google decided to try to kill it's preordained assassin.
Google was on top in search engine software; Office-like software was free, for crissakes. Why not simply blend the two together? What would it hurt? Maybe Microsoft, if the world's annoyance with closed specs on its office documents achieves critical mass.
Google may become top dog, but only because the alternative was to be a dead dog.
Microsoft extended its contract with Apple to keep Office current on Macs NOT for the unit sales, but because, at the time, they were litigating the monolopy case in court. They needed Apple to stay alive to keep up the pretense that they were engaging an open market without recourse to any monopoly (which was nonsense - they lost). Bill also invested a bunch of cash in Apple at the same time for the same reason: Bill needed Apple alive, not crushed, so that Microsoft could make a case against a finding of monopoly.
Now that Linus is around, Office's days on the Mac may be numbered. They aren't needed any more. But, I think Bill prefers the devil he knows to the devil which is free and open sourced. He'll keep Apple alive as long as he can, even though he lost the monopoly ruling, because the alternative is all Linux and OpenOffice.
The US buys control for its money -- and not all that much money, either. The US bought a UN resolution which it carefully "misunderstood" which gave itself cover to invade, occupy, confiscate and control Iraq, the second largest oil field in the world, under false pretences. That "oops" is worth trillions in cash and control over Europe and Asia's access to that critical oil supply during the boom years of their growth. Cash for us and the ability to strangle those we can't beat any other way.
The UN contributions are negligible compared to the money we'll bleed from Iraq until the sun turns cold.
Engadget had someone dissect a Nano, -- and priced the components as best he could. He came up with a figure of 90 dollars. If he is correct, the Nano has a 100+ percent markup, ignoring marketing and shipping and so forth.
Slashdot Mirror
1 g would be perfect, but without a serious nuclear drive or orbiting laser cannon it ain't gonna happen. Now, accelerating at 1/100 g, or even 1/10 g, via an ion rocket... you start slow, but it adds up and you are MOVING after a few weeks. The solar system has been wide open for decades; ion rockets powered by nuclear reactors can move men to Pluto in a reasonable amount of time. I don't remember the exact figures, but ion rockets get you to Mars in weeks rather than months -- accelerating at a fraction of one g.
A smoking smear where the coastline cities used to be. After sixty nine storms, every sandy beach city lined with casinos would probably be wadded up and washed inland.
Nonsense. there is no such thing as a 'wrongful acquital'. You made that up. If the jury finds someone innocent, that's it, it's over, no second guessing by you. It's not 'wrongful'. There is no legal concept for what you just made up.
And it's about par with the idea of 'judicial activism'. The biggest self-determined opponents of such are on the Supreme Court, where they just last (?) week decided that Oregon had no right to legalize suicide even if the voters decide it is law. They overrode it, let's face facts here, because it offends their religion. THAT is judicial activism, and hypocrisy. JA is not a philosphy. It's a smear word used by those who want to shut down 'liberal' decisions. Right wing judge lawmaking is perfectly fine by their lights, because their Federalist Society judges are always right, and liberal socialist commie judges are always wrong.
I'm sure you could.
Look at from the perspective of book lovers, who perennially chant, "But nothing will ever replace the feeling of a good book, of turning pages with my fingers, sitting in my parlour on my straw-filled wingback chair by the light of my coal oil lamp, while my cleaning girl washes my clothes in the river."
An eBook that looks like a book sounds idiotic to a geek, but will sell well to people who simply can't wrap their heads around a new idea. And teachers love to see their students loaded down with the weight of at least one heavy book, suffering as they have suffered, serves the little buggers right. "Tonight you will need your English, Algebra, Economics, Webster's dictionary, Thesaurus, Encyclopedia Brittanica and your school desk when you do your homework assignments." No wonder we bus them to school. No child could lift the weight of all those dead trees for half a mile both ways.
Ah, um, let's see, market forces, parts are ready and in place for production, demand is huge, cost of production ridiculously cheap... hmmm....
Never.
Of course, there's nothing political about private corporations, like say, Diebold? Maker of the voting machines you can set up to predetermine the winner of any race? Whose chief executive pledged to do what he could to deliver Ohio for Bush? Or ICANN, which was owned, or may still be owned, by the Carlyle Group, an invitation-only investment corporation up to its eyeholes in ex-politians. Tony Blair, for example, will get a seat and block of stock that will set him up for life when he retires from political life. Carlyle, hard-core rightist, invites members in as reward for service to their interests. How about Haliburton, whose CEO is sitting as Vice President (some say acting President) of the US, still being paid his bloody salary into a deferred account as billions pour into his company from no-bid contracts in Iraq and the Katrina Money-sucking Zone? Haliburton IS the US government!
EESSSH. In a corporatist world, what Mussolini dubbed a "fascist" government, there is no real distinction between private corporations and the elected government. There is NO DIFFERENCE between the political world and the business world. Business is politics times infinity. Actions without oversight, no personal responsibility, no penalties, and no limits to power. Government is just another department to the corporate world.
The UN is right. We're not to be trusted with the world's communications system. We don't care about the world. We are a mortal danger to their survival. You don't put a two year old solipsist at the controls of a train.
Apparently Bush wasn't babbling during the debate. He really DID plan on more than one internet.
He's a genius.
The high cost and low speed are not caused by high infrastructure costs, or low population density. The telcos and cable companies have plenty of cash to lay down fiber to the home. They spend it on acquisitions of competitors and huge payouts to executives. It's not a problem of population density differences between, say, Tokyo and New York. If that were the rule, NYC would have 10 dollar a month fiber connections for everyone in Manahattan. They keep the prices high because they can.
The difference between Japan and the U.S., between France and the U.S., between Canada and the U.S. is this: they still have a liberal social policy -- the concept of the public good. They spend tax dollars and regulate providers so that the cost of high-speed telecom stays very low indeed.
The U.S., in what can only be called the era of Bushism -- he didn't invent it, but he is the shining avatar of all that it embraces -- has gone Ayn Rand, and no longer has a core concept of the public good, with perhaps the exception of highways and of course the military. We don't have an emotional understanding of why regulation of commerce is needed, or why taxes sometimes should be spent to build things that private corporations simply will not provide at a reasonable cost.
After all, if you, in your car driving from your suburban home to your job, had to pay a private corporation to build and service every inch of asphalt from your driveway to your job -- how much do you think you'd be paying? Oh baby, I'm clenching thinking about it. Protect us, O Lord, from the thieves in the broad daylight...
They'd be the cheapest crappiest roads they could get away with. They'd lobby Congress to exempt them from liability from death and damage caused by baseline maintenance. Look at what happened in Ohio -- that massive electrical blackout was caused by a conglomerate cutting powerline maintenance beneath the bone to pump up profits. Private companies SUCK at that sort of thing. All the drive for higher profits at all costs. Since the people who actually run corporations have no personal responsiblity for their actions, they have no sense of same. Elected officials at least can go to jail, lose their jobs, be exposed as lying jackasses. Companies are faceless machines which just don't care. ESPECIALLY when they are monoplies. We practically fought a civil war to disable the trusts in the early 20th century for just that reason.
Most technologically advanced countries have good public health care, fast internet, and good highways because they still adhere to the concept of the public good overriding the possiblity of someone making an immense profit. It's as simple as that.
Seriously, every one of these "tests" will be used in the future by potential employers to screen job applicants. They won't be stopped, as if our government for the forseeable future will ever pass a law controlling what tests HR departments administer. The Supreme Court is being stacked with Federalist Society judges who will shut down attempts to circumsribe the freedom of corporations to hire and fire.
The hell of it is, along with just about every other test, including lie detectors and personality analyses (holy Dianetics, Batman) the test for these disorders are not failsafe. Hell, they might not work at all, or the eager beaver purveyors of these tests are misrepresenting what they are testing. Lie detectors are widely used, tho scientists have called them horsecrap for a half century. Drug tests have false positives, a monkey could walk around personality tests, and background checks rely on shadowy security companies who don't exactly keep their information current or accurate.
Another "test" that tests for, what, exactly? Some marker that current hypotheses deduce may or may not indicate anxiety disorder. But, like all the other tests, long after they are discredited, we have to march over to the testing lab if we want to get a job.
Anyone hear about fMRI's? Ah, the ultimate. Mind reading via MRI's! Oh, I can't wait for that crap to take off.
Follow the money. These tests are going to make screening companies billions of dollars. Whether or not they actually test anything in the real world is irrelevant.
And Americans will whistle and go along, because they have no imagination, no sense of their own history, no sense of what it means to be a free people. As if business is the only activity of mankind that deserves civil liberties.
Ya know, after downloading the Vividas plugin last night, I'm getting a java message reporting that my c:/ directory is corrupted, and wants me to run chkdsk. And Azureus has gone wonky. It wouldn't knock off the repetitive warning box until I shut down Azureus and my OpenOffice tray icon. Until I read your post, I didn't make the connection. Oy, don't tell me their code somehow accidentally messed up my java installation? Anyone else notice an error message after installing the plugin?
And before the 5.0 rated version is out and downloaded, everyone, please buy at least 50 million worth of tickets. The movie cost 30 to make, and the studios want to see at least 50 back to greenlight another sequel.
Last I heard, it was number one at ten million in gross receipts. Everyone, all together, let's see it four more times...
A person should always wait for a girl to reach 18, not because one would hurt her by having icky sex with her, but because our society is apeshit insane and would tear her and her older partner to shreds. So waiting until she's of age is just sanity in an insane world.
Of course, if everyone who'd had sex with an underaged partner were actually found out and prosecuted, the US would just become a giant prison complex full of lifers. I'd not be in there with the majority of y'all, but that's because I had a slow rampup to romance when I was young. I can't recall many teenagers I've known who didn't have an affair with an older man or woman at some time.
You don't think teenagers gain their advanced sexual skills from people their own age, do ya? Someone's teaching someone somwhere in the sexual food chain.
To keep a planet warm enough when it isn't in the habitable torus around the sun, you don't need to constantly generate heat; you just have to retain more heat than you radiate away.
We live on Earth because of this balance. To do it in the outer solar system, where an Earth would normally freeze solid, you adjust the insulation, as it were, by maintaining higher proportions of greenhouse gases relative to the remainer of atmospheric gases than would be safe in the inner solar system. Crank up the greenhouse effect, and keep toasty. High CO2 levels could be maintained by either terraforming machinery, or by keeping plantlife down (hence the desert conditions on the outworld planets! Aha!) to a precise miniumum to keep O2 levels proportionately lower realtive to greenhouse gases than normal here on Earth.
Now, the levels would be adjusted over time. When the moon/planet is first being defrosted, you'd have to raise the temperature a lot. Fusion plants fueled by deuterium or tritium culled from water ice would blast away for decades, just gererating huge amounts of heat -- giant plasma torches -- to get the whole setup's temperature down to a point a man could stand outside in a pressure suit without freezing solid in a frozen methane bath. After temps come down to a habitable range, pump methane and CO2 into the atmosphere in huge amounts, and let the greenhouse effect from trapped solar energy add heat to the mix. Adjust the fusion-powered torches to adapt to the increase in heat retention caused by the atmosphere, until the day they aren't needed anymore.
After your stable CO2 atmo is warm enough, you start adding plants and bacteria to start a photosythesis cycle. Water would come from melted ices as the atmo warms up. Add animals, earthworms, selected insects, seeds, stir and simmer. Then dump your wretched refuse from the Core planets to populate the place, at your set wages. Wait for revolt, shoot, then simmer again...
Oh yeah, light levels. Actually, even if the solar radiation were only one hundredth as intense as it is here in Earth's orbit, to human eyes it would look much the same. A room with a ten thousand watt bulb would blind you, even if the sun at noonday would be a thousand times more intense. It's hard to accept, but a sunlit terraformed Titanian sky, in orbit around Saturn a billion miles from the Sun, would look exactly like a summer day in New York to your senses, only 93 million miles from the sun.
In the movie, Joss states that there are eighty (80) terraformed worlds in that solar system.
:)
It's possible, I guess. If you look at the figures on discovered extrasolar planets, they of course are all superJovian monsters. SuperJovians may have Earth/Venus-sized moons by the dozens, waiting for someone to come and terraform.
Let's see, use nuke plants to power gas generators that process raw materials of the planet's surface and atmosphere to release oxygen and nitrogen; add carbon dioxide or methane for a greenhouse gas; get some genetically engineered bacteria to jump start a CO2/O2 cycle; oops, don't forget water, lots of it; get some genetech plants and animals on the ground to start a bioshpere; and earthworms. Earthworms are key for turning the soil.
On an icy moon, methane, water ice, frozen CO2 and nitrogen are available by the megaton lot. On worlds more rocky and possessing fewer available volatile elements, crash land some frozen comets composed mostly of the elements needed to start a biosphere. The impact alone would melt a few million tons of gases to get things going.
Okay, we've got a new solar system with Terra-size moons around SuperJovian planets, moons big enough to be called planets if they could orbit the central sun without getting captured by the gas giants. This works. And you don't even have to be in the habitable zone of the solar system to get enough warmth to survive -- the greenhouse effect can be adjusted so that the atmosphere retains far more heat than would be possible on Earth, because of the issues with ice caps disappearing and the ecosystem going blooey. The trick would be dicey, and expensive. Those would be the outer worlds, the worlds where the poor and the down-and-out would migrate to from the core, easy-to-maintain core worlds.
In a solar system scaled to superJovian orbits, the distances betweeen worlds could range from a half billion to ten billion or more miles as the space crow flies. Our solar system would be a blip there, a midget.
Okay, that down, I'd have to say that Whedon has never said that there weren't interstellar craft. The Core may well have a few, and that would be another tale, ripe for the telling. Maybe the star hops are done with antimatter photon rockets -- and antimatter would be pretty damned expensive to make. Antimatter rockets could accelerate for the standard year at one gee until speed is c minus a hair, do the flipover, and decelerate at one gee for another year. Due to the famous relativistic effect, the closer you push your speed to c, the more time "slows down" for the ship relative to the frame in which it travels. So four light-years or four hundred, it's pretty much always a two year jaunt, with the majority of the trip spent in hyperslowed time. The "galaxy" that Joss speaks of may well be experiencing the arrival of thousands of starships launched from the Core planets, tho the subject may not be a daily concern to the poor outbackers of the solar system in which the Serentity's crew cruises.
The world of Serentity may be far more complex and fun that we know yet.
Hey, Joss, gimme a call, I can get you out of this mess
The "cluestick" is that Microsoft keeps subverting open standards so's everone must buy their buggy software. To do this, they abuse their monopoly, which should have been broken up when the US wont the case in court five years ago. But Bushists dropped the ball, wink wink, and now here we are.
To accept the lesson of the cluestick, we have to accept Microsoft as our lord and master. We might as well shut down comp sci courses and let Microsoft become computer science. All hail Redmond, the source of all that is clueful and proper.
Eh, I'm off to bed. America, get electroshock treatment. You're in a neocon coma.
You're a settler on a newly inhabited planet. There's a job shortage, and you barely make any hard cash to buy bread with, much less hovercraft.
You'd be wealthy if you owned a horse, some oxen, a henhouse and a corrugated aluminum shack to live in whilst you raised fungus-y tomatoes. You'd be RICH if you could save up the money to buy a shotgun.
The people who own the factories that make hovercraft are the people who can afford lasers, hovercraft, and decent cops. In the Serenity world, there just isn't really all that much wealth in the outback.
Camels are self-fueling, and have the advantage over machinery in that they can flawlessly make new camels to replace themselves when they wear out. Ditto all the other low-tech in Serenity. When you dump a million people on a newly-terraformed world, you don't give 'em diesel tractors: you give them horses.
It's not a preview: it's the first nine minutes of the movie. I saw the movie, and I can attest that it is the first nine minutes.
Whedon simply didn't get the difference between a solar system, a group of stars with solar systems, and a galaxy. He may have been straightened out later.
I was butting my head on this for a while: after all, if the new solar system was colonized by Earth, then - bloody hell! - they had interstellar drives. For hundreds of millons of passengers.
But the series never shows anyone making star hops. They're all fusion rockets, and they only travel a few million miles, spending weeks or days en route. Probably deuterium/tritium fueled.
What happened to the mighty starships? What happened to the Terran supertransports? And didn't anyone read "The High Frontier" on Earth? Why go to another star and terraform planets when you can stay around our solar system and build land areas in habitats with congomerate land area millions of times that of Earth's surface?
The confusion rattled me after I figured out that Serenity wasn't a starship. If the author can't figure out the difference between a solar system, a group of stars WITH solar systems, and a galaxy of Earths, he ain't writing science fiction -- he's using the form instead. Sci-Fi instead of SF. With the caveat that his universe doesn't make any sense.
However, I ignore all that and love the movie. I just wish they taught astronomy in writing classes.
We've been videotaping their shows for twenty years. Have we been jacking their creativity for two decades? Are they showing any signs of damage from the VCRjacking of their shows?
Occurs to me that Google has no choice but to try to become Microsoft's death.
Microsoft had already long decided to kill Google. They've a Google-killer search engine, a maps adjunct, all that. They want Google dead, and being a monopoly, they can use dominance in their OS and Office products to spend any competitor to death.
But, Google decided to try to kill it's preordained assassin.
Google was on top in search engine software; Office-like software was free, for crissakes. Why not simply blend the two together? What would it hurt? Maybe Microsoft, if the world's annoyance with closed specs on its office documents achieves critical mass.
Google may become top dog, but only because the alternative was to be a dead dog.
I've a longer memory than most here.
Microsoft extended its contract with Apple to keep Office current on Macs NOT for the unit sales, but because, at the time, they were litigating the monolopy case in court. They needed Apple to stay alive to keep up the pretense that they were engaging an open market without recourse to any monopoly (which was nonsense - they lost). Bill also invested a bunch of cash in Apple at the same time for the same reason: Bill needed Apple alive, not crushed, so that Microsoft could make a case against a finding of monopoly.
Now that Linus is around, Office's days on the Mac may be numbered. They aren't needed any more. But, I think Bill prefers the devil he knows to the devil which is free and open sourced. He'll keep Apple alive as long as he can, even though he lost the monopoly ruling, because the alternative is all Linux and OpenOffice.
The US buys control for its money -- and not all that much money, either. The US bought a UN resolution which it carefully "misunderstood" which gave itself cover to invade, occupy, confiscate and control Iraq, the second largest oil field in the world, under false pretences. That "oops" is worth trillions in cash and control over Europe and Asia's access to that critical oil supply during the boom years of their growth. Cash for us and the ability to strangle those we can't beat any other way.
The UN contributions are negligible compared to the money we'll bleed from Iraq until the sun turns cold.
Engadget had someone dissect a Nano, -- and priced the components as best he could. He came up with a figure of 90 dollars. If he is correct, the Nano has a 100+ percent markup, ignoring marketing and shipping and so forth.
The ViPod will be the remote control, recorder, and player all in one little package.