An earlier/. story about the space elevator got me thinking about this problem. My concern with the space elevator is that passengers spend a week in the Van Allen belts where there's a lot of radiation. On a couple of occasions I've discussed J. Storrs-Hall's space railway concept, but some have suggested it's less practical than the space elevator.
So here's an idea. Put a captured asteroid into an elliptical orbit. Perigee is at about 200 miles, going about 10 km/sec, apogee is at about 18000 miles going about 1900 km/sec. As the asteroid approaches perigee, it lowers a cable (made of space-elevator rope) into the upper atmosphere. As the cable gets into the atmosphere, the asteroid starts paying it out very fast, so that the end moves slow enough to be grabbed by a high-altitude airplane and attached to a spaceship. Once attached, the asteroid pays out cable slower and slower, accelerating the spaceship to the asteroid's velocity, and very slightly slowing the asteroid in its orbit. Eventually the asteroid starts reeling in the cable faster and faster, accelerating the spaceship further.
The spaceship only needs to be accelerated a little past the asteroid's velocity to reach escape velocity. There are a few possible ways to correct the energy loss of the asteroid's orbit. The simplest is for the airplane to attach a fuel tank to the cable along with the spaceship so that after the spaceship detaches, the asteroid can reel in the fuel and do a burn to pump its orbit back up.
Of course there's a big PR battle to be fought, to make people feel good about a big rock in a relatively low orbit over the earth. But if it worked, it would use a lot less rope than the space elevator, and it would get you into space quicker.
Python support: Parrot runs 4/7 of the pie-thon test suite
Python 2.3.3 (#1, May 7 2004, 10:31:40) [GCC 3.3.3 20040412 (Red Hat Linux 3.3.3-7)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> 4 / 7 0 >>>
Ouch!
Now I'll get my thumb out of my ass and pass along my gratitude to everybody who's worked on Parrot. An open-source VM, particularly one targeted at existing open-source languages, is a mitzvah. It even has the nice side benefit of creating a little commonality between the communities. Thank you.
When I was three or four years old, there was a musical bit on a variety show where people drew eyeballs on their chins, put upside-down fake clothes over their faces from the nose up. They turned the camera upside-down while these people stood together and sang. So it looked like a row of singing cartoonish Humpty Dumptys.
Man, that gave me the worst friggin nightmares. I was familiar with cartoon characters speaking in human voices and understood that they were fictional. I think what bugged me was these Humpty Dumpties were clearly biological, and maybe I might run into one in the woods. My parents spent what seemed like hours, explaining what was going on and how these things were actually normal safe humans.
But still I wonder, what the hell kind of human thinks of something like that? I still question the characterization that such people are or were "safe".
if you take the space elevator up to about 700km you have the same potential energy as LEO
This idea intrigued me, so I did the math but got a different answer. To get a potential energy difference equal to the kinetic energy needed to be in LEO, you need to climb to 5995 km above the earth's surface. This means you need to traverse almost the entire inner Van Allen belt.
Instead, let the elevator lift the spacecraft to a height and drop it. Then the craft accelerates horizontally, ending up in LEO. With an acceleration of 10 Gs, you need 80 seconds to reach 8 km/sec. So the distance fallen is about 33 km. To end up at a 200-km-high LEO orbit, climb to about 233 km. Climb higher, and you can live with lower accelerations.
That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach. I don't know offhand how much rocket fuel is needed, but it's got to be a better deal than launching from the ground. Interesting.
for LEO you don't exactly get close to the Van Allen belts. Please elaborate.
When you ascend the space elevator, you go 200 MPH and you spend about a week getting to GEO. If you're at LEO, you've got a horizontal velocity component of about 90,000 times that much. When you do the burn at apogee, you can do a big enough burn to cross the Van Allen belts in a half-orbit. The Apollo astronauts crossed the belts in a few hours, getting about 1% of a lethal dose. Presumably the same should be possible when launching from the railway.
One person commented that this may help advance the Space Elevator, and that may be true, but it's an even bigger help for the
space railway because the material is good under compression (the SE needs something good under tension).
The space elevator subjects its payload to about a week of heavy radiation, so it's not practical for passengers. There are still lots of non-alive things we want to put in space cheaply, and for those it's great.
For humans, J. Storrs-Hall (of sci.nanotech fame) proposed a space railway that could be built sooner and more cheaply than a space elevator. It's a linear induction motor laid along a 300km-long track, 100km above the ground, where the atmosphere is thin enough to take a few orbits to decay your orbit. You drive your spaceship up a ramp to one end, and the motor accelerates you along the railway at about 10G for about 90 seconds, putting you in a slightly elliptical orbit with an apogee on the other side of the Earth. When you hit apogee, you do a burn to get into a higher orbit.
Relatively little radiation because you cross the Van Allen belts much faster. You get to LEO without burning any of your own fuel, which is a big energy win. The railway is low enough that orbits still decay slowly, so there's no space junk to worry about at that altitude.
The structure is a collection of A-frames, built like a radio tower. Like the space elevator, only a tiny fraction of the height is subjected to significant weather. The structure is under compression, not tension, which widens the choice of materials. According to Storrs-Hall, existing synthetic diamond would be suitable.
Do NOT get the engineer who wrote the code to also write the test. It's fairly fundamental - the engineer who wrote it will have a prejudiced view of what should/will work.
The test can be viewed as "our understanding of what this code should be doing", because the test is used to identify when the code is broken. It's a good idea to have the engineer write the test because other people can look at the test and say, "OK, this is how he understood what he was supposed to do." So the test is a public document which can be renegotiated by management, for instance, "oops, you forgot to test this case".
I think the situation you're worried about is where an engineer is keenly aware of some parts of a problem and mostly unaware of some others, so he writes tests for the stuff he knows, and ignores the stuff he doesn't. And of course his tests pass because he's not testing what's broken. That's why the test has to be a negotiated public document that other people get to critique. But there's no reason the engineer can't write the test. He just can't arbitrarily veto his managers about what needs testing.
Powerballs are an interesting storage solution. Reasonable pressure or cold temperature, I don't know about the energy density. You have a tank half-full of water, with ping-pong balls floating in it. Inside the ping-pong balls is sodium hydride (NaH), floating above the water is hydrogen gas at a not-too-high pressure. When the pressure drops, a robot grabs a ping-pong ball, cuts it open, and the NaH reacts with the water to free hydrogen and put NaOH (lye) in the water. When most of the ping-pong balls have been cut, you pump out the tank, discard the water, recycle the broken shells, and convert the NaOH back into NaH -- this is where you put energy into the system from outside.
As I said, I don't know how the energy density is with this approach, I'm not enough of a chemist and I'm too busy to do the math right now. If anybody more knowledgeable wants to weigh in, feel free. I've known people to whine about driving around a car with a tankfull of lye, but it's a lot more environmentally benign than driving around with a tankfull of gasoline.
...seems impossible, unless you has some kind of containment where the anti-matter doesn't actually touch anything.
Don't worry, we've got it covered. You ever see one of those aerodynamic trick gadgets where a balloon is suspended in an updraft from a fan? You push the balloon to one side, it recenters itself over the fan.
Now take out the balloon and put in a blob of antimatter. If the antimatter is too heavy to float in the breeze, duct-tape the antimatter to the balloon.
No insight. No thoughts on where technology is heading. No review of how technology has come this far...
Aggregation by itself is valuable. Google News is only an aggregation service. With both of them, I learn about stuff I'd probably never stumble across on my own.
The ads are clearly identifiable as such, you're not being deceived and you don't need to click on them.
Deeper insight would be nice, esecially from somebody who's got his eye on things. But I'm inclined to cut the guy some slack.
The space elevator subjects its payload to about a week of heavy radiation, so it's not practical for passengers (at least those with future plans). There are still lots of non-alive things we want to put in space cheaply, and for those it's great.
For humans, J. Storrs-Hall (of sci.nanotech fame) proposed a space railway that could be built sooner and more cheaply than a space elevator. It's a linear induction motor laid along a 300km-long track, 100km above the ground, where the atmosphere is thin enough to take a few orbits to decay your orbit. You drive your spaceship up a ramp to one end, and the motor accelerates you along the railway at about 10G for about 90 seconds, putting you in a slightly elliptical orbit with an apogee on the other side of the Earth. When you hit apogee, you do a burn to get into a higher orbit.
Relatively little radiation because you cross the Van Allen belts much faster. You get to LEO without burning any of your own fuel, which is a big energy win. The railway is low enough that orbits still decay slowly, so there's no space junk to worry about at that altitude.
The structure is a collection of A-frames, built like a radio tower. Like the space elevator, only a tiny fraction of the height is subjected to significant weather. The structure is under compression, not tension, which widens the choice of materials. According to Storrs-Hall, existing synthetic diamond would be suitable.
It would be a good thing for this particular million dollars to be redirected toward humanitarian aid. The economic reality is that people don't all share the same priorities, and different people have their hands on different millions. You can't stop people doing stuff you disagree with, but you can make it easier or more enticing for them to do the things you want.
The post I found really interesting in this thread was the one saying, go to the Oxfam site and see what ten bucks can do. I scoped around the site for a few minutes and couldn't find a "Here's what ten bucks can do" page. I'm sure they could create one rather easily. They also don't have a "Make an anonymous donation via Paypal" page. If there were a way to give ten bucks right now without putting my name and address in their database, I'd do it.
One other thing besides the legal point about the public domain. Doctorow posted the content with his publisher's approval. The idea would be to not need a publisher in the first place, because your only costs are the time to write it and the cost of maintaining a website. If the contributions are successful, you can then self-publish a paper version. If Doctorow is any indication, the online version provides the advertising for the paper version, so you can skip the book signing tour.
Or, if you're really like Cory Doctorow, you do what he did and put the whole thing online for free. He claims it led to increased sales of the print version.
I knew he'd posted the whole thing, I read it online myself before buying two paper copies. But I don't think he put it in the public domain. There are legal differences. It's easy and cheap to find videos with Mickey Mouse, but try making and selling Rickey Rat cartoons. In fairness, if he'd put DAOITMK in the public domain, he probably never could have gotten his publisher onboard.
If I am creating digital music I am putting my time and effort in to that, rather than other things. Thus if I wish to do it all the time, I must recieve compensation for it since I have physical needs... IF you want all IP to be free, that's fine, but then you basically religate it to the realm of spare-time projects.
A few years ago Stephen King was doing an experiment of an end-run around the publishing industry, and doing it wrong (possibly with the intention of poisoning that well for unknown authors, as a bone thrown to his publishing buddies). What he did wrong was to insist that a minimum percentage of downloaders should contribute. What he should have done was release each chapter in response to a total contribution for the previous one, regardless of the percentage. He required an honesty level that wasn't necessary for his business model, and which caused his experiment to "fail".
Most writers obviously don't have the creds of Stephen King. So suppose it's a few years ago and you're Cory Doctorow - you're a very good writer but you're not widely known (now watch as I get told that I was the only person on Earth not following his work for the last 20 years). You have a great idea for a wonderful book about immortality and Disneyland. I forget how many chapters it is, let's say twenty. You put the first four in the public domain and post them on your website. You announce you will post the next chapter when you've gotten contributions totalling some amount of money. If you're good, the contributions will roll in pretty quickly. Maybe you put a thermometer picture on your website to let readers know how close they are to seeing the next chapter.
If this works, the creator gets his money even though the entire work ends up in the public domain. It would be really interesting to see somebody try this.
I'm surprised to see relatively few posts talking about the DRM implications of this. (Maybe my threshold is set too high.) Let's remember who we're talking about here. Remember that whole Sonny Bono perpetual copyright thing?
Disney is the legal powerhouse trying to make general-purpose computers illegal. You want to be free to install any OS and perform any computation, they want to sell you a welded-shut box with pushbuttons labelled "Lion King", "Beauty and the Beast", and "Little Mermaid", and no disk drives, slots, or connectors.
This version may be crude and we may laugh at it, but this is the start of the slippery slope. This machine can utterly fail in the marketplace and it won't matter because they'll learn from it and they'll be back. If they win the war, it won't matter to them or to us how many battles they lost along the way.
When I was a kid in the 1960s nobody worried about Japanese competition because they only made junk. Twenty years later they were eating our lunch. Disney knows exactly where they want to go and they have the blessings of the current administration and they don't have the disadvantages of centuries of cultural isolation and a language barrier.
The only reason to go for wifi distance records is to build an indie Ashcroft-proof internet. It should be possible to route IP packets over inexpensive laser pointers for pretty large distances. I'm not aware that much is being done with this. I found several instances of people doing RS-232 over laser, but very little about IP over laser.
You probably didn't get to the end of my post, where I freely admitted that I haven't kept up with recent Python developments. I'm glad to see this has been done.
You take a very snide tone with me. I was obliged to stop keeping up with Python development because my wife had a series of medical problems (dating from around the beginning of the PEP process, when all this was current discussion) that eventually led to her death last year. What do you expect to gain from such indiscriminate contempt? I had been on the pro-Python side of this debate; do you habitually attack your allies? In time you may want to rethink the efficacy of these strategies.
You appear to be claiming that the OOP component of Python is a kludge and Ruby got it right. That may be true (insofar as Python has primitive types that aren't objects) but I'm having to guess that you intend this, because the example you give does nothing to support or clarify your point. If you can't think hard enough to explain yourself, and then slam Python with a Windows comparison, why would I ever want to follow your advice on language selection? Every once in a great while I take a look at Ruby and try to find something that justifies my time to learn another language. I have yet to find anything I want or need in Ruby that isn't already present in Python.
I've used Python a lot. Is the language maintainable and expressive? Yup. Do people solve useful, important problems with it? Yeah, they do. A more practical complaint against Python might involve performance issues. But gee, it's easy to write C libraries, and lots of great libraries have already been written.
I can think of one complaint I do have with Python. It's evolving more quickly than I like. I could have been happy with 1.5.2 for another five years. Then they instituted this PEP process for rapidly introducing new features, and while I was busy with other things, they went through another dozen version numbers.
There has apparently been some thought given to how to create snapshots of Wikipedia. If it's small enough to fit on a CDROM, I definitely want to give it a try myself.
The related talk page also looks interesting, and includes programs in Python and Perl for processing the Wikipedia information in various ways.
At no point have we seen any motivation for why the Sith are the way they are.
You're right about that. I dimly recall once being at a bookstore and browsing thru some of the extra-canonical novelizations and seeing something about this, but the movies haven't touched it.
In the...lightsabre duel from Epsiode I there is a moment where the fighting has ceased... Maul walks around like a caged tiger while Gui-Con just sits there meditating... This does not move the story foward!
I found that a really effective scene. It didn't explain the Sith, but it was a great piece of character exposition, and it shows how far the two systems of thinking have diverged, and also that the Force by itself is morality-neutral. The Force didn't coerce the Jedi into their way of thinking, they chose it.
Both guys are archetypal for their organizations. Sith work to keep themselves pumped up and angry and adrenaline-driven. Jedis work to maintain their orientation within their spiritual framework. Maul's caged tiger was some of the best acting the franchise has ever seen.
Slashdot Mirror
So here's an idea. Put a captured asteroid into an elliptical orbit. Perigee is at about 200 miles, going about 10 km/sec, apogee is at about 18000 miles going about 1900 km/sec. As the asteroid approaches perigee, it lowers a cable (made of space-elevator rope) into the upper atmosphere. As the cable gets into the atmosphere, the asteroid starts paying it out very fast, so that the end moves slow enough to be grabbed by a high-altitude airplane and attached to a spaceship. Once attached, the asteroid pays out cable slower and slower, accelerating the spaceship to the asteroid's velocity, and very slightly slowing the asteroid in its orbit. Eventually the asteroid starts reeling in the cable faster and faster, accelerating the spaceship further.
The spaceship only needs to be accelerated a little past the asteroid's velocity to reach escape velocity. There are a few possible ways to correct the energy loss of the asteroid's orbit. The simplest is for the airplane to attach a fuel tank to the cable along with the spaceship so that after the spaceship detaches, the asteroid can reel in the fuel and do a burn to pump its orbit back up.
Of course there's a big PR battle to be fought, to make people feel good about a big rock in a relatively low orbit over the earth. But if it worked, it would use a lot less rope than the space elevator, and it would get you into space quicker.
Ouch!
Now I'll get my thumb out of my ass and pass along my gratitude to everybody who's worked on Parrot. An open-source VM, particularly one targeted at existing open-source languages, is a mitzvah. It even has the nice side benefit of creating a little commonality between the communities. Thank you.
Man, that gave me the worst friggin nightmares. I was familiar with cartoon characters speaking in human voices and understood that they were fictional. I think what bugged me was these Humpty Dumpties were clearly biological, and maybe I might run into one in the woods. My parents spent what seemed like hours, explaining what was going on and how these things were actually normal safe humans.
But still I wonder, what the hell kind of human thinks of something like that? I still question the characterization that such people are or were "safe".
This idea intrigued me, so I did the math but got a different answer. To get a potential energy difference equal to the kinetic energy needed to be in LEO, you need to climb to 5995 km above the earth's surface. This means you need to traverse almost the entire inner Van Allen belt.
Instead, let the elevator lift the spacecraft to a height and drop it. Then the craft accelerates horizontally, ending up in LEO. With an acceleration of 10 Gs, you need 80 seconds to reach 8 km/sec. So the distance fallen is about 33 km. To end up at a 200-km-high LEO orbit, climb to about 233 km. Climb higher, and you can live with lower accelerations.
That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach. I don't know offhand how much rocket fuel is needed, but it's got to be a better deal than launching from the ground. Interesting.
When you ascend the space elevator, you go 200 MPH and you spend about a week getting to GEO. If you're at LEO, you've got a horizontal velocity component of about 90,000 times that much. When you do the burn at apogee, you can do a big enough burn to cross the Van Allen belts in a half-orbit. The Apollo astronauts crossed the belts in a few hours, getting about 1% of a lethal dose. Presumably the same should be possible when launching from the railway.
For humans, J. Storrs-Hall (of sci.nanotech fame) proposed a space railway that could be built sooner and more cheaply than a space elevator. It's a linear induction motor laid along a 300km-long track, 100km above the ground, where the atmosphere is thin enough to take a few orbits to decay your orbit. You drive your spaceship up a ramp to one end, and the motor accelerates you along the railway at about 10G for about 90 seconds, putting you in a slightly elliptical orbit with an apogee on the other side of the Earth. When you hit apogee, you do a burn to get into a higher orbit.
Relatively little radiation because you cross the Van Allen belts much faster. You get to LEO without burning any of your own fuel, which is a big energy win. The railway is low enough that orbits still decay slowly, so there's no space junk to worry about at that altitude.
The structure is a collection of A-frames, built like a radio tower. Like the space elevator, only a tiny fraction of the height is subjected to significant weather. The structure is under compression, not tension, which widens the choice of materials. According to Storrs-Hall, existing synthetic diamond would be suitable.
The test can be viewed as "our understanding of what this code should be doing", because the test is used to identify when the code is broken. It's a good idea to have the engineer write the test because other people can look at the test and say, "OK, this is how he understood what he was supposed to do." So the test is a public document which can be renegotiated by management, for instance, "oops, you forgot to test this case".
I think the situation you're worried about is where an engineer is keenly aware of some parts of a problem and mostly unaware of some others, so he writes tests for the stuff he knows, and ignores the stuff he doesn't. And of course his tests pass because he's not testing what's broken. That's why the test has to be a negotiated public document that other people get to critique. But there's no reason the engineer can't write the test. He just can't arbitrarily veto his managers about what needs testing.
As I said, I don't know how the energy density is with this approach, I'm not enough of a chemist and I'm too busy to do the math right now. If anybody more knowledgeable wants to weigh in, feel free. I've known people to whine about driving around a car with a tankfull of lye, but it's a lot more environmentally benign than driving around with a tankfull of gasoline.
Don't worry, we've got it covered. You ever see one of those aerodynamic trick gadgets where a balloon is suspended in an updraft from a fan? You push the balloon to one side, it recenters itself over the fan.
Now take out the balloon and put in a blob of antimatter. If the antimatter is too heavy to float in the breeze, duct-tape the antimatter to the balloon.
Aggregation by itself is valuable. Google News is only an aggregation service. With both of them, I learn about stuff I'd probably never stumble across on my own.
The ads are clearly identifiable as such, you're not being deceived and you don't need to click on them.
Deeper insight would be nice, esecially from somebody who's got his eye on things. But I'm inclined to cut the guy some slack.
And why not? Cute as a button, and handy with machinery.
For humans, J. Storrs-Hall (of sci.nanotech fame) proposed a space railway that could be built sooner and more cheaply than a space elevator. It's a linear induction motor laid along a 300km-long track, 100km above the ground, where the atmosphere is thin enough to take a few orbits to decay your orbit. You drive your spaceship up a ramp to one end, and the motor accelerates you along the railway at about 10G for about 90 seconds, putting you in a slightly elliptical orbit with an apogee on the other side of the Earth. When you hit apogee, you do a burn to get into a higher orbit.
Relatively little radiation because you cross the Van Allen belts much faster. You get to LEO without burning any of your own fuel, which is a big energy win. The railway is low enough that orbits still decay slowly, so there's no space junk to worry about at that altitude.
The structure is a collection of A-frames, built like a radio tower. Like the space elevator, only a tiny fraction of the height is subjected to significant weather. The structure is under compression, not tension, which widens the choice of materials. According to Storrs-Hall, existing synthetic diamond would be suitable.
The post I found really interesting in this thread was the one saying, go to the Oxfam site and see what ten bucks can do. I scoped around the site for a few minutes and couldn't find a "Here's what ten bucks can do" page. I'm sure they could create one rather easily. They also don't have a "Make an anonymous donation via Paypal" page. If there were a way to give ten bucks right now without putting my name and address in their database, I'd do it.
They've got a big tank of nitrous oxide and they're using it as rocket fuel? Priorities here, people!
Nonsense! Slashdot has both kinds of political ideologies, Green AND Libertarian.
One other thing besides the legal point about the public domain. Doctorow posted the content with his publisher's approval. The idea would be to not need a publisher in the first place, because your only costs are the time to write it and the cost of maintaining a website. If the contributions are successful, you can then self-publish a paper version. If Doctorow is any indication, the online version provides the advertising for the paper version, so you can skip the book signing tour.
I knew he'd posted the whole thing, I read it online myself before buying two paper copies. But I don't think he put it in the public domain. There are legal differences. It's easy and cheap to find videos with Mickey Mouse, but try making and selling Rickey Rat cartoons. In fairness, if he'd put DAOITMK in the public domain, he probably never could have gotten his publisher onboard.
A few years ago Stephen King was doing an experiment of an end-run around the publishing industry, and doing it wrong (possibly with the intention of poisoning that well for unknown authors, as a bone thrown to his publishing buddies). What he did wrong was to insist that a minimum percentage of downloaders should contribute. What he should have done was release each chapter in response to a total contribution for the previous one, regardless of the percentage. He required an honesty level that wasn't necessary for his business model, and which caused his experiment to "fail".
Most writers obviously don't have the creds of Stephen King. So suppose it's a few years ago and you're Cory Doctorow - you're a very good writer but you're not widely known (now watch as I get told that I was the only person on Earth not following his work for the last 20 years). You have a great idea for a wonderful book about immortality and Disneyland. I forget how many chapters it is, let's say twenty. You put the first four in the public domain and post them on your website. You announce you will post the next chapter when you've gotten contributions totalling some amount of money. If you're good, the contributions will roll in pretty quickly. Maybe you put a thermometer picture on your website to let readers know how close they are to seeing the next chapter.
If this works, the creator gets his money even though the entire work ends up in the public domain. It would be really interesting to see somebody try this.
Disney is the legal powerhouse trying to make general-purpose computers illegal. You want to be free to install any OS and perform any computation, they want to sell you a welded-shut box with pushbuttons labelled "Lion King", "Beauty and the Beast", and "Little Mermaid", and no disk drives, slots, or connectors.
This version may be crude and we may laugh at it, but this is the start of the slippery slope. This machine can utterly fail in the marketplace and it won't matter because they'll learn from it and they'll be back. If they win the war, it won't matter to them or to us how many battles they lost along the way.
When I was a kid in the 1960s nobody worried about Japanese competition because they only made junk. Twenty years later they were eating our lunch. Disney knows exactly where they want to go and they have the blessings of the current administration and they don't have the disadvantages of centuries of cultural isolation and a language barrier.
You take a very snide tone with me. I was obliged to stop keeping up with Python development because my wife had a series of medical problems (dating from around the beginning of the PEP process, when all this was current discussion) that eventually led to her death last year. What do you expect to gain from such indiscriminate contempt? I had been on the pro-Python side of this debate; do you habitually attack your allies? In time you may want to rethink the efficacy of these strategies.
I've used Python a lot. Is the language maintainable and expressive? Yup. Do people solve useful, important problems with it? Yeah, they do. A more practical complaint against Python might involve performance issues. But gee, it's easy to write C libraries, and lots of great libraries have already been written.
I can think of one complaint I do have with Python. It's evolving more quickly than I like. I could have been happy with 1.5.2 for another five years. Then they instituted this PEP process for rapidly introducing new features, and while I was busy with other things, they went through another dozen version numbers.
The related talk page also looks interesting, and includes programs in Python and Perl for processing the Wikipedia information in various ways.
You're right about that. I dimly recall once being at a bookstore and browsing thru some of the extra-canonical novelizations and seeing something about this, but the movies haven't touched it.
In the ...lightsabre duel from Epsiode I there is a moment where the fighting has ceased... Maul walks around like a caged tiger while Gui-Con just sits there meditating... This does not move the story foward!
I found that a really effective scene. It didn't explain the Sith, but it was a great piece of character exposition, and it shows how far the two systems of thinking have diverged, and also that the Force by itself is morality-neutral. The Force didn't coerce the Jedi into their way of thinking, they chose it.
Both guys are archetypal for their organizations. Sith work to keep themselves pumped up and angry and adrenaline-driven. Jedis work to maintain their orientation within their spiritual framework. Maul's caged tiger was some of the best acting the franchise has ever seen.