Your hypothesis certainly wins out over mine when Occam's razor is applied.
However, since this is a fictional situation in the first place, I'm quite comfortable in my conviction that the overall story makes more sense if there's a Force connection between the Jedi and his weapon.
I wouldn't hesitate to accept your own analysis if we were discussing lightsabers that actually existed in the real world.
I'm not aware of any sources to back up the first assertion.
That assertion is merely the hypothesis I have found to most completely explain the lightsaber phenomena observed in the movies.
So when I hear that Han Solo once activated a lightsaber, my hypothesis requires me to conclude that Han Solo must be Force sensitive.
Since it seems to be the case that Han Solo *is* Force sensitive (isn't he the father of one or more Force-sensitive children, now?), my hypothesis remains intact.
One, Force Sensitivity. It's pretty clear both from canon and non-canonical sources that Han Solo had it.
Two, precision engineering in the lightsaber hardware, such that even the merest hint of Force Sensitivity is enough to inform the projection mechanism and produce a manageable beam.
I always figured that the hilt of the lightsaber was an energy projector, and the Jedi used the Force to control the length of the beam and provide the true cutting power of the blade.
Which is why the lightsaber is an exclusively Jedi weapon: without the Force, it's just a really expensive flashlight.
I wish someone would do the same for every Slashdot thread: read until they're sure it's all useless repetition, and then go back to the top of the thread and post a marker message where the new hotness ends and the old and busted begins.
Seriously? Star Trek could use a frickin' through-line.
Otherwise, it's like an hour-long sitcom with twice as much "sit" and no "com" at all.
No continuity, no plot development, no character development. Heck, even [the original] Battlestar Galactica was better space opera in that regard.
On the other hand, "en masse" means (literally) "in mass". The two terms have the same utility in conversation, and could be used interchangeably in almost any English sentence (assuming you will allow commonly-used foreign phrases in an English sentence). Nor is any of the meaning of "en masse" lost, when you replace it with "in mass".
Actually, since Science Fiction, as a genre, is concerned with telling stories about the relationships between humans and their technology, Firefly doesn't count as SciFi either. It's really just "crime stories... in space!"[1]
Firefly is also a great show, of course. I'm just saying that its greatness does not stem from it doing SciFi better than Star Trek, or at all[2].
----------
[1]Seriously. Firefly is not SciFi. Replace any piece of technology in the story with current technology or no technology at all, and the story still stands.
[2]Star Trek is also not at all SciFi, either. Compare
"let's write a story examining how transporters and matter replicators might change human society
with
"let's use transporters and matter replicators to handwave away all of the practical considerations of our futuristic soap opera, so we can focus on the soap opera itself"
First, the longer a piece of software is in use, the greater the chance of finding an obscure or unlikely error condition. The older a piece of sofware, the more of its bugs will become apparent, and the more likely it is that a crippling bug will be found. Old software breaks down.
Second, operating constraints change over time. If a piece of software meets its initial demands, greater and greater demands are placed on it over time. If a piece of software is kept in use for many years, it will likely find itself handling a workload far in excess of what was imagined when the software was first created. When Comair first began using this software, it probably didn't have the business volume to make the transaction limit a problem. Because Comair's business grew over many years, but the software was not grown along with it, what was originally an unimportant design constraint turned out to be a major bug. Old software does not grow to meet new demands. Old software breaks down.
Old software doesn't rust. It doesn't develop stress fractures. It doesn't corrode or go stale. But in its own very real and very important way, old software does degrade over time; if not in itself, in its relationship to the constant growth in the demands placed upon it. Old software breaks down.
Go someplace else and watch the site wither on the vine.
This site has already withered and died. Behold my stunning proof!
Comments generate site traffic. Site traffic costs money. Somebody must pay that money, or the site goes down.
The commenters, who appreciate the site so much that they cannot imagine living without it, have apparently never considered taking up a collection, or making donations to keep their beloved site running.
Now, the owners of the site are faced with a bill that must be paid. The owners decide that the best solution is billing commenters for the traffic costs their commments incur.
The commenters, who have already demonstrated that they don't give two shits about the costs of running the site they claim to love so much, are now brought whining to us, so that we may inexplicably take their side in this shameful episode.
I can't shake the mental image of these people down at City Hall, ranting pathetically: "I contribute to Central Park by strolling upon the grass, and chatting with my fellow citizens? Why should I also be taxed to pay for the gardner who mows the grass and keeps it healthy?"
Oh, there's tons more to the shopping experience than just driving down and renting a video. But on the other hand, who would sign up for a shopping experience that involves driving down and discovering that the selection is total ass?
Compare shopping for that really good movie at Blockbuster to shopping for that really good movie on Netflix.
... will come pre-coated with some sort of chemical sealant that guarantees 100% kernel poppage, but causes birth defects that would make the Thalidomide babies look like Cabbage Patch Kids.
How is this question logical? Is knowing one is living in a certain condition equal to the ability to extricate oneself?
A good point. On first reading, I saw in your original post an implication that greater experience with poverty and suffering leads logically to greater chances of success when attempting to overcome poverty and suffering.
After re-reading your post, I see that you were only implying that greater experience leads to greater motivation.
Your point about their experience of the "American Dream" via television isn't quite so good. I stand by the main point of my original reply. TV may lead them to believe that it possible to live the dream in America (which is true, by the way). But TV does not give them the vital experience of knowing that it is possible for them to live the dream in their own land. In fact, their immediate, personal experience of such things appears to generally be quite the opposite: all attempts to build a better tomorrow meet with inevitable failure.
TV won't motivate the poor of the Sudan to extricate themselves from poverty in Sudan. It only motivates them to emigrate to some other country, where the chances of success are demonstrably higher.
As to your first point, that greater experience leads to greater motivation, that's not always true either. It's often the case that prolonged experience with failure saps motivation, while even a little experience with success restores it.
But again, I think the real problem isn't the experience or the motivation, but the dismal prospects for success, that separate the American worker from the African worker. The direct and indirect causes of those dismal prospects is another debate altogether, though.
They have more to gain, and probably know more about how poverty and suffering than the average american
If they know so much about it, how come they still have it?
It makes just as much sense to say that, never having seen what lies beyond poverty and suffering, they probably aren't nearly as motivated to work hard to get there.
I think that actually, they believe they don't have more to gain, and so they are not motivated to work for a better tomorrow. And really, this makes a lot of sense. Why bother busting your ass to build a legacy of wealth and prosperity for your family, when the neighboring tribe could come and slaughter you all tomorrow? Or some evil dictator could seize your property, rape your wife, enslave your children, and murder you? Much better to keep your head in the dust and wait for the U.N. aid to arrive. If you're lucky, they'll only demand a few hours with your youngest daughter as payment.
I'm telling you, Dubya may be the most evil tyrant on the planet, but at least I'm free to pursue my career and pay my bills in peace. The only thing I have to worry about in my old age is that at some point the decrepitude of my body will outrun my own ability and my government's willingness to pay to keep it going. Could be sooner, could be later, give or take this or that stupid government policy or whatever. But still, it's a much better deal than most people ever get.
And THAT is why I work so hard to secure my future. Because I know I have one to secure.
I dunno. People patent implentations and applications of the Simple Machines all the time, but we don't run around screaming, "they're taking away our Inclined Planes and Levers!"
I could see DNA ending up in the same situation, patent-wise.
It would have been helpful if the scientists had provided a hypothesis on the preservation of the tissues.
It would have been even more helpful if you'd given the scientists enough time to complete their initial analysis of the tissues, before complaining that they haven't come up with an explanation for how they got there.
Well, we do know that the human brain seems quite adept at calculating ballistic trajectories. Try catching a baseball. How many FLOPS involved in that? (Don't forget to compensate for atmospheric drag!)
I don't think it's about the "FLOPS" the human brain does, so much as it's about the FLOPS a computer would have to do, to emulate the same phenomenon of human mentation.
Not only that, but isn't this actually a case of "potential value" (not greater than the total number of possible connections inherent to the network - Metcalfe's Law) versus "typical usaage patterns"?
Networks are just like anything else in life. They have a maximal or optimal value, but most people don't bother trying to get full value out of them.
If Metcalfe were to say "the average mid-sized sedan seats up to five people, for which reason I value it as a five-person car", these guys would reply "yeah, but most people don't fill all five seats in their mid-sized sedans, therefore mid-sized sedans don't really seat five people after all... pwn3d!"
It's stupid. Metcalfe is talking about potential value. These guys are talking about typical utilization.
surely you aren't comparing the flexablity i have to modify the source of any part of my OS to suit my top 500 cluster, with the flexability of MS WIZARD dialoges???
You are correct. I'm not comparing those two things at all. You're the one who's making that comparison.
I agree with your thinking, but I also believe you're not going far enough. Perhaps the whole reason they're developing a new version of the OS is because they agree with you, too. Think about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough.
Your hypothesis certainly wins out over mine when Occam's razor is applied.
However, since this is a fictional situation in the first place, I'm quite comfortable in my conviction that the overall story makes more sense if there's a Force connection between the Jedi and his weapon.
I wouldn't hesitate to accept your own analysis if we were discussing lightsabers that actually existed in the real world.
I'm not aware of any sources to back up the first assertion. That assertion is merely the hypothesis I have found to most completely explain the lightsaber phenomena observed in the movies. So when I hear that Han Solo once activated a lightsaber, my hypothesis requires me to conclude that Han Solo must be Force sensitive. Since it seems to be the case that Han Solo *is* Force sensitive (isn't he the father of one or more Force-sensitive children, now?), my hypothesis remains intact.
Um... whatever source has him successfully activating a lightsaber is good enough for me.
Simple.
One, Force Sensitivity. It's pretty clear both from canon and non-canonical sources that Han Solo had it.
Two, precision engineering in the lightsaber hardware, such that even the merest hint of Force Sensitivity is enough to inform the projection mechanism and produce a manageable beam.
I always figured that the hilt of the lightsaber was an energy projector, and the Jedi used the Force to control the length of the beam and provide the true cutting power of the blade.
Which is why the lightsaber is an exclusively Jedi weapon: without the Force, it's just a really expensive flashlight.
This is a valuable service.
I wish someone would do the same for every Slashdot thread: read until they're sure it's all useless repetition, and then go back to the top of the thread and post a marker message where the new hotness ends and the old and busted begins.
Again, sincerely, thanks!
Thank you. I am now even more convinced that software breakdowns and hardware breakdowns share significant similarities.
Please allow me to rephrase your post:
Old cars don't break down so much if they're well maintained.
New cars break down a lot if they're poorly maintained.
Therefore, a new car is no better than an old car.
I'm totally leaving out the part where you tried to convince me to keep my old software because Windows sucks. I hope you don't mind.
Seriously? Star Trek could use a frickin' through-line. Otherwise, it's like an hour-long sitcom with twice as much "sit" and no "com" at all. No continuity, no plot development, no character development. Heck, even [the original] Battlestar Galactica was better space opera in that regard.
On the other hand, "en masse" means (literally) "in mass". The two terms have the same utility in conversation, and could be used interchangeably in almost any English sentence (assuming you will allow commonly-used foreign phrases in an English sentence). Nor is any of the meaning of "en masse" lost, when you replace it with "in mass".
Firefly is also a great show, of course. I'm just saying that its greatness does not stem from it doing SciFi better than Star Trek, or at all[2].
----------
[1]Seriously. Firefly is not SciFi. Replace any piece of technology in the story with current technology or no technology at all, and the story still stands.
[2]Star Trek is also not at all SciFi, either. Compare
with See what I mean?First, the longer a piece of software is in use, the greater the chance of finding an obscure or unlikely error condition. The older a piece of sofware, the more of its bugs will become apparent, and the more likely it is that a crippling bug will be found. Old software breaks down.
Second, operating constraints change over time. If a piece of software meets its initial demands, greater and greater demands are placed on it over time. If a piece of software is kept in use for many years, it will likely find itself handling a workload far in excess of what was imagined when the software was first created. When Comair first began using this software, it probably didn't have the business volume to make the transaction limit a problem. Because Comair's business grew over many years, but the software was not grown along with it, what was originally an unimportant design constraint turned out to be a major bug. Old software does not grow to meet new demands. Old software breaks down.
Old software doesn't rust. It doesn't develop stress fractures. It doesn't corrode or go stale. But in its own very real and very important way, old software does degrade over time; if not in itself, in its relationship to the constant growth in the demands placed upon it. Old software breaks down.
This site has already withered and died. Behold my stunning proof!
Comments generate site traffic. Site traffic costs money. Somebody must pay that money, or the site goes down.
The commenters, who appreciate the site so much that they cannot imagine living without it, have apparently never considered taking up a collection, or making donations to keep their beloved site running.
Now, the owners of the site are faced with a bill that must be paid. The owners decide that the best solution is billing commenters for the traffic costs their commments incur.
The commenters, who have already demonstrated that they don't give two shits about the costs of running the site they claim to love so much, are now brought whining to us, so that we may inexplicably take their side in this shameful episode.
I can't shake the mental image of these people down at City Hall, ranting pathetically: "I contribute to Central Park by strolling upon the grass, and chatting with my fellow citizens? Why should I also be taxed to pay for the gardner who mows the grass and keeps it healthy?"
Please tell me that you have a Socialist solution to propose.
Because that I would pay to see.
Oh, there's tons more to the shopping experience than just driving down and renting a video. But on the other hand, who would sign up for a shopping experience that involves driving down and discovering that the selection is total ass?
Compare shopping for that really good movie at Blockbuster to shopping for that really good movie on Netflix.
Totally missing from the article, and the abstract:
Does the process produce as much fuel as is necessary to fuel the process? More? Less?
What's that you say? The article cleary states that this process is cheaper than the old process?
Great! But is it cheap *enough*?
... will come pre-coated with some sort of chemical sealant that guarantees 100% kernel poppage, but causes birth defects that would make the Thalidomide babies look like Cabbage Patch Kids.
A good point. On first reading, I saw in your original post an implication that greater experience with poverty and suffering leads logically to greater chances of success when attempting to overcome poverty and suffering.
After re-reading your post, I see that you were only implying that greater experience leads to greater motivation.
Your point about their experience of the "American Dream" via television isn't quite so good. I stand by the main point of my original reply. TV may lead them to believe that it possible to live the dream in America (which is true, by the way). But TV does not give them the vital experience of knowing that it is possible for them to live the dream in their own land. In fact, their immediate, personal experience of such things appears to generally be quite the opposite: all attempts to build a better tomorrow meet with inevitable failure.
TV won't motivate the poor of the Sudan to extricate themselves from poverty in Sudan. It only motivates them to emigrate to some other country, where the chances of success are demonstrably higher.
As to your first point, that greater experience leads to greater motivation, that's not always true either. It's often the case that prolonged experience with failure saps motivation, while even a little experience with success restores it.
But again, I think the real problem isn't the experience or the motivation, but the dismal prospects for success, that separate the American worker from the African worker. The direct and indirect causes of those dismal prospects is another debate altogether, though.
If they know so much about it, how come they still have it?
It makes just as much sense to say that, never having seen what lies beyond poverty and suffering, they probably aren't nearly as motivated to work hard to get there.
I think that actually, they believe they don't have more to gain, and so they are not motivated to work for a better tomorrow. And really, this makes a lot of sense. Why bother busting your ass to build a legacy of wealth and prosperity for your family, when the neighboring tribe could come and slaughter you all tomorrow? Or some evil dictator could seize your property, rape your wife, enslave your children, and murder you? Much better to keep your head in the dust and wait for the U.N. aid to arrive. If you're lucky, they'll only demand a few hours with your youngest daughter as payment.
I'm telling you, Dubya may be the most evil tyrant on the planet, but at least I'm free to pursue my career and pay my bills in peace. The only thing I have to worry about in my old age is that at some point the decrepitude of my body will outrun my own ability and my government's willingness to pay to keep it going. Could be sooner, could be later, give or take this or that stupid government policy or whatever. But still, it's a much better deal than most people ever get.
And THAT is why I work so hard to secure my future. Because I know I have one to secure.
I could see DNA ending up in the same situation, patent-wise.
(Reference)
It would have been even more helpful if you'd given the scientists enough time to complete their initial analysis of the tissues, before complaining that they haven't come up with an explanation for how they got there.
Bah. Those Mastodons were fresh-frozen, more or less perfectly preserved.
This tissue came from a fossil. That's what we like to call "taking it to The Next Level".
Also, I'm pretty sure that dinosaurs are several orders of magnitude more prehistoric than mastodons, taking it to The Next Level yet again.
In other news, I don't mean to call you a mendacious wet blanket, but...
Well, we do know that the human brain seems quite adept at calculating ballistic trajectories. Try catching a baseball. How many FLOPS involved in that? (Don't forget to compensate for atmospheric drag!)
I don't think it's about the "FLOPS" the human brain does, so much as it's about the FLOPS a computer would have to do, to emulate the same phenomenon of human mentation.
Not only that, but isn't this actually a case of "potential value" (not greater than the total number of possible connections inherent to the network - Metcalfe's Law) versus "typical usaage patterns"?
Networks are just like anything else in life. They have a maximal or optimal value, but most people don't bother trying to get full value out of them.
If Metcalfe were to say "the average mid-sized sedan seats up to five people, for which reason I value it as a five-person car", these guys would reply "yeah, but most people don't fill all five seats in their mid-sized sedans, therefore mid-sized sedans don't really seat five people after all... pwn3d!"
It's stupid. Metcalfe is talking about potential value. These guys are talking about typical utilization.
You are correct. I'm not comparing those two things at all. You're the one who's making that comparison.
I agree with your thinking, but I also believe you're not going far enough. Perhaps the whole reason they're developing a new version of the OS is because they agree with you, too. Think about it.