While ProLiant was indeed a Compaq line, IMHO the HP ProLiants are better hardware than the Compaqs were. X86[-64] architecture sure, but definitely server grade.
I think (IANAL) this could render them liable for any "information" provided from their "service" -- from copyright violations to kiddy porn to libel. It's "common carrier" status that protects the phone company and other ISPs from this liability.
Depends on the characteristics of the gravity generation as to what you can use it for, especially if it only curves space positively and not negatively. (Otherwise your attempt at an Alcubierre warp just turns into a black hole.)
The Inara with a hand laser (in the outback) I was referring to was the episode where we meet "Mrs. Reynolds" again and they steal the Lassiter. Inara doesn't kill anyone just shoots out a piece of hardware from 10 or 15 yards away.
I'd forgotten the other incidents you mention. Time to watch the series again.
I was talking about the series too, haven't seen the film yet. Recall the scene where, in a firefight, River takes one look at where the 3 bad guys are, picks up the gun Kaylee dropped and, not even looked at bad guys, takes the three out with one shot each.
She also does a fair job of saving everyone else in the last (?) episode where the bounty hunter comes aboard.
The release of the original Star Wars happened back in 1977, about a month before the end of school. There were no such things as previews,
Not true. I saw a preview of the original Star Wars in a theatre months before the release, late 1976. I remember it well; it was shortly after my father died and the preview gave me a feeling of something to look forward to that I hadn't had in a while.
two who are good in a fight, two who are hot babes
Well, of the two hot babes mentioned, one has certainly shown herself to be unnaturally good in a fight (although there may be a problem with consistency), and the other generally avoids fights but has shown herself to be a pretty good shot with a hand laser.
But that's a nit. I agree with all your points, and your argument about character design is well made.
Suppose something happened to the sun to make it a lot brighter. Earth becomes a cinder (so you'd get references to "Earth that was") and the moons of the outer planets become terraformable -- especially if said outer planets were to warm up to brown dwarf stage.
I'm not saying that that is Whedon's backstory -- although in some episodes he uses planet names same as some of the moons in our solar system.
As to what could cause such a thing: well, increase compression on the gas balls in the system to increase fusion rate, increase gravity on the moons to hold atmosphere at a warmer temperature, and it looks like we've had an at least local change in the gravitional constant. Given that the ships have artficial gravity, maybe some experiment went horribly wrong, or maybe there was a war that involved "gravity bombs" in a different sense than the conventional. Or maybe you can just put a gravity generator on a large asteroid and give it an atmosphere.
Shrug.
As 2001: A Space Odyssey showed, the practical realities of space travel are pretty damn boring, paranoid ship's computers aside.
That speed (7 m/sec) is equivalent to a fall from about 8 feet (2.5 m). That sounds a bit high, but maybe mil chutes fall faster? (Perhaps it's the extra weight of the equipment.) Back when I learned to skydive (I forget the chute -- TU-something, although the sport chute of the day was the ParaCommander - early 70s) we were told it was about the same as a 4 foot drop, and practiced PLFs by jumping from a platform not quite that high.
In other words, IBM and SGI threw in filesystems that they happened to have lying around anyway, and aren't used that much.
HP may not have contributed any single huge chunk of code like a filesystem (which is fine, we have plenty), but they do contribute a lot in the way of drivers, maintainability code, support, etc. Which in the long run is probably much more useful, if less flashy, than Yet Another File System.
(A very quick look at kernel code shows that actually most IBM contributions are s390 and ppc64 specific, and most HP contributions are ia64 and pa-risc specific. Big surprise.)
But, I can buy an HP laptop with Linux preloaded. I don't think I can even buy an IBM laptop anymore, just one with an IBM sticker on it (and no Linux).
As with anything large, it does take a little while for a corporate culture to turn around - and it has only been a few months. But the seeds of change were already there or Carly wouldn't have been ousted, and new CEO Hurd comes from quite a different background and has a rep for turnarounds.
Atomic bombs existed before anything went into space.
Not strictly true. The trajectory of a V2 rocket took it, by a few miles, above the altitude defined as where space begins. Granted, V2's didn't stay in space, but they did briefly go into it, and did so about 9 months before the atomic bomb.
As echo-location is the dolphin's primary means of sensing its environment -- analogous to eyes in primates -- and since sound travels four and a half times faster in water than in air, scientists speculate that the faster brain stem transmission time, and perhaps the paralimbic lobe as well, support speedy processing of sound.
I'm sure that's certainly part of it, but they miss another obvious relationship. Consider that bats also sense their environment by echolation (to one degree or another, depending on species). So why don't dolphins merely need brains 4.5 times bigger than bats? Mechanical processing.
Bats -- especially those that have a high reliance on echolocation, such as those that hunt insects in flight -- have complex curves in the shape of their ears (which are large) and also in their nose/mouth area (where the outgoing pulse is shaped). This mechanically filters the sound returned from different directions in different ways, (human ears do the same, but to a lesser degree), reducing the processing requirement. Dolphins (and other cetaceans) can't afford external ears because of streamlining and heat retention, so they need to add yet more processing power to compensate, beyond the speed of sound difference.
Start watching the movie from somewhere in the middle, then watch the movie from the start again
Heh. I did this once back when cinemas didn't care if you came in in the middle and sat though to see what you'd missed. I wish I could remember the title, it was a mid-60s movie about an art theft with overtones of Misson: Impossible. I came in just as the heist was starting. Then the first half had a totally different heist -- same art object and crooks, but different setting, different security systems, etc.
I wasn't until more than a third of the way through the movie that I realized the first "heist" was really the planner explaining how the job was supposed to go -- and the rest of the movie is what really happens when they find out that the security systems had been changed.
I'd been wondering if the theater was showing two different versions of the movie.
Well, arguably your first and perhaps fourth point relate to the third. And it wasn't ludicrous, it was a strategy of technology (google for that phrase if you don't get it).
But certainly, there were other factors. Whether they'd have the effect they did when they did (rather than years or decades later) sans Reagan (imagine four more years of Carter, for example) can't easily be answered.
I was in the USSR (as it still was then) less than a week after Gorbachev was ousted. Interesting times.
Don't believe much that McNamara has to say about Viet Nam. He's no doubt trying to shift blame from his own idiotic policies (eg "measured response", where the goal was not to win the war so much as to keep fighting it without losing, hoping that the other guy will eventually get tired and give up) that prolonged the war unnecessarily. He also pretty much killed the X-aircraft programs and curtailed other technological research that might upset the balance of the Cold War, thereby prolonging that one, too. (It was Reagan's reinstatement of such programs that ultimately ended the Cold War.)
Eisenhower wasn't President when McNamara was SecDef, Kennedy and Johnson were. If he didn't like Eisenhower's policies, he was in exactly the position to change them.
Yep, Lucas broke the fundamental rule that is the magician's prime directive: never explain how it's done. This rule also holds for good science fiction writers: if you're making something up, don't try to explain it -- you'll break the spell for anyone who knows more about the subject than you do (and there will be many).
If he had to have some sort of objective test for the Force (vs the Jedi just sensing that "the Force is strong in this one" of young Anakin), Lucas could have (and may yet, in a re-edit) had the midichlorians be a marker for Force, a side-effect of its presence rather than its cause.
Back then, yes, there was nothing simple about it. They didn't even know what it was they needed to know, although they had some ideas. And they had to work it all out with slide rules and mechanical calculators.
We have more advanced tools these days. It's still a major engineering effort to actually do it (vs armchair design beginning with "assume sufficient weapons grade plutonium (or uranium)", and even those ignore the difficulties in machining plutonium into the right shape parts. (You could cast it, if you really don't care about safety, and have plenty.)
Layer of what? The Po/Be? Foil is fine. You want them to mix and emit neutrons. You can put a thicker layer of Be around the whole thing as a reflector if you like.
How powerful should the explosives be?
It's a gun. Use gunpowder.
How do you shape the charges?
See above.
How pure do the explosives need to be in order to behave predictably? How does temperature affect them? How do you time the explosives to the triggering of the gun? How do you time the explosives so they detonate simultaneously?
It's a gun, see above. Nothing simultaneous about it, one piece of U-235 can be stationary.
How does the gun work? rails? powder?
Think cannons and cannonballs. It's a gun. 18th if not 17th Century technology.
Will that affect the shaped charges?
You seem to be confusing it with implosion-type plutonium bombs. Those are harder.
If anything is wrong, you have a very expensive dirty bomb, and you can't exactly test the thing, so you can't really know if it's as easy as you say it is.
The US was so sure that Little Boy (a U-235 gun-type bomb) would work they didn't even bother testing it before dropping it on Nagasaki. Fat Man (Pu implosion) they did test.
If Avalon might or might not be in Longhorn, and Longhorn isn't.net added to Windows, and Longhorn isn't WINFS, well... exactly what IS Longhorn, anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
While ProLiant was indeed a Compaq line, IMHO the HP ProLiants are better hardware than the Compaqs were. X86[-64] architecture sure, but definitely server grade.
The cable co's may come to regret this.
I think (IANAL) this could render them liable for any "information" provided from their "service" -- from copyright violations to kiddy porn to libel. It's "common carrier" status that protects the phone company and other ISPs from this liability.
Depends on the characteristics of the gravity generation as to what you can use it for, especially if it only curves space positively and not negatively. (Otherwise your attempt at an Alcubierre warp just turns into a black hole.)
Good points all.
The Inara with a hand laser (in the outback) I was referring to was the episode where we meet "Mrs. Reynolds" again and they steal the Lassiter. Inara doesn't kill anyone just shoots out a piece of hardware from 10 or 15 yards away.
I'd forgotten the other incidents you mention. Time to watch the series again.
I was talking about the series too, haven't seen the film yet. Recall the scene where, in a firefight, River takes one look at where the 3 bad guys are, picks up the gun Kaylee dropped and, not even looked at bad guys, takes the three out with one shot each.
She also does a fair job of saving everyone else in the last (?) episode where the bounty hunter comes aboard.
The release of the original Star Wars happened back in 1977, about a month before the end of school. There were no such things as previews,
Not true. I saw a preview of the original Star Wars in a theatre months before the release, late 1976. I remember it well; it was shortly after my father died and the preview gave me a feeling of something to look forward to that I hadn't had in a while.
two who are good in a fight, two who are hot babes
Well, of the two hot babes mentioned, one has certainly shown herself to be unnaturally good in a fight (although there may be a problem with consistency), and the other generally avoids fights but has shown herself to be a pretty good shot with a hand laser.
But that's a nit. I agree with all your points, and your argument about character design is well made.
Tut, you have too many implicit assumptions.
Suppose something happened to the sun to make it a lot brighter. Earth becomes a cinder (so you'd get references to "Earth that was") and the moons of the outer planets become terraformable -- especially if said outer planets were to warm up to brown dwarf stage.
I'm not saying that that is Whedon's backstory -- although in some episodes he uses planet names same as some of the moons in our solar system.
As to what could cause such a thing: well, increase compression on the gas balls in the system to increase fusion rate, increase gravity on the moons to hold atmosphere at a warmer temperature, and it looks like we've had an at least local change in the gravitional constant. Given that the ships have artficial gravity, maybe some experiment went horribly wrong, or maybe there was a war that involved "gravity bombs" in a different sense than the conventional. Or maybe you can just put a gravity generator on a large asteroid and give it an atmosphere.
Shrug.
As 2001: A Space Odyssey showed, the practical realities of space travel are pretty damn boring, paranoid ship's computers aside.
Well, M$ doesn't make hardware.
Actually, come to think of it they do. Where's the Beowulf cluster of XBoxes?
That speed (7 m/sec) is equivalent to a fall from about 8 feet (2.5 m). That sounds a bit high, but maybe mil chutes fall faster? (Perhaps it's the extra weight of the equipment.) Back when I learned to skydive (I forget the chute -- TU-something, although the sport chute of the day was the ParaCommander - early 70s) we were told it was about the same as a 4 foot drop, and practiced PLFs by jumping from a platform not quite that high.
In other words, IBM and SGI threw in filesystems that they happened to have lying around anyway, and aren't used that much.
HP may not have contributed any single huge chunk of code like a filesystem (which is fine, we have plenty), but they do contribute a lot in the way of drivers, maintainability code, support, etc. Which in the long run is probably much more useful, if less flashy, than Yet Another File System.
(A very quick look at kernel code shows that actually most IBM contributions are s390 and ppc64 specific, and most HP contributions are ia64 and pa-risc specific. Big surprise.)
But, I can buy an HP laptop with Linux preloaded. I don't think I can even buy an IBM laptop anymore, just one with an IBM sticker on it (and no Linux).
As with anything large, it does take a little while for a corporate culture to turn around - and it has only been a few months. But the seeds of change were already there or Carly wouldn't have been ousted, and new CEO Hurd comes from quite a different background and has a rep for turnarounds.
Atomic bombs existed before anything went into space.
Not strictly true. The trajectory of a V2 rocket took it, by a few miles, above the altitude defined as where space begins. Granted, V2's didn't stay in space, but they did briefly go into it, and did so about 9 months before the atomic bomb.
As echo-location is the dolphin's primary means of sensing its environment -- analogous to eyes in primates -- and since sound travels four and a half times faster in water than in air, scientists speculate that the faster brain stem transmission time, and perhaps the paralimbic lobe as well, support speedy processing of sound.
I'm sure that's certainly part of it, but they miss another obvious relationship. Consider that bats also sense their environment by echolation (to one degree or another, depending on species). So why don't dolphins merely need brains 4.5 times bigger than bats? Mechanical processing.
Bats -- especially those that have a high reliance on echolocation, such as those that hunt insects in flight -- have complex curves in the shape of their ears (which are large) and also in their nose/mouth area (where the outgoing pulse is shaped). This mechanically filters the sound returned from different directions in different ways, (human ears do the same, but to a lesser degree), reducing the processing requirement. Dolphins (and other cetaceans) can't afford external ears because of streamlining and heat retention, so they need to add yet more processing power to compensate, beyond the speed of sound difference.
It could come down to how they defined "broadcast".
Sci-Fi doesn't broadcast, they're carried by cable (not a broadcast at all) and satellite, the latter being a beamcast or narrowcast.
Or maybe Sci-Fi just bought out the rights.
Yes! That's it, thank you! I knew it was a one-word title but I also knew it wasn't Topkapi or Charade. (Also good movies.)
Thanks for the memory refresh.
Start watching the movie from somewhere in the middle, then watch the movie from the start again
Heh. I did this once back when cinemas didn't care if you came in in the middle and sat though to see what you'd missed. I wish I could remember the title, it was a mid-60s movie about an art theft with overtones of Misson: Impossible. I came in just as the heist was starting. Then the first half had a totally different heist -- same art object and crooks, but different setting, different security systems, etc.
I wasn't until more than a third of the way through the movie that I realized the first "heist" was really the planner explaining how the job was supposed to go -- and the rest of the movie is what really happens when they find out that the security systems had been changed.
I'd been wondering if the theater was showing two different versions of the movie.
Well, arguably your first and perhaps fourth point relate to the third. And it wasn't ludicrous, it was a strategy of technology (google for that phrase if you don't get it).
But certainly, there were other factors. Whether they'd have the effect they did when they did (rather than years or decades later) sans Reagan (imagine four more years of Carter, for example) can't easily be answered.
I was in the USSR (as it still was then) less than a week after Gorbachev was ousted. Interesting times.
Don't believe much that McNamara has to say about Viet Nam. He's no doubt trying to shift blame from his own idiotic policies (eg "measured response", where the goal was not to win the war so much as to keep fighting it without losing, hoping that the other guy will eventually get tired and give up) that prolonged the war unnecessarily. He also pretty much killed the X-aircraft programs and curtailed other technological research that might upset the balance of the Cold War, thereby prolonging that one, too. (It was Reagan's reinstatement of such programs that ultimately ended the Cold War.)
Eisenhower wasn't President when McNamara was SecDef, Kennedy and Johnson were. If he didn't like Eisenhower's policies, he was in exactly the position to change them.
Yep, Lucas broke the fundamental rule that is the magician's prime directive: never explain how it's done. This rule also holds for good science fiction writers: if you're making something up, don't try to explain it -- you'll break the spell for anyone who knows more about the subject than you do (and there will be many).
If he had to have some sort of objective test for the Force (vs the Jedi just sensing that "the Force is strong in this one" of young Anakin), Lucas could have (and may yet, in a re-edit) had the midichlorians be a marker for Force, a side-effect of its presence rather than its cause.
Back then, yes, there was nothing simple about it. They didn't even know what it was they needed to know, although they had some ideas. And they had to work it all out with slide rules and mechanical calculators.
We have more advanced tools these days. It's still a major engineering effort to actually do it (vs armchair design beginning with "assume sufficient weapons grade plutonium (or uranium)", and even those ignore the difficulties in machining plutonium into the right shape parts. (You could cast it, if you really don't care about safety, and have plenty.)
Aargh, my bad. Little Boy was of course dropped on Hiroshima. Fat Man targeted Nagasaki.
What size of a sphere?
It can vary, but six inches is good.
How thick is each layer?
Layer of what? The Po/Be? Foil is fine. You want them to mix and emit neutrons. You can put a thicker layer of Be around the whole thing as a reflector if you like.
How powerful should the explosives be?
It's a gun. Use gunpowder.
How do you shape the charges?
See above.
How pure do the explosives need to be in order to behave predictably? How does temperature affect them? How do you time the explosives to the triggering of the gun? How do you time the explosives so they detonate simultaneously?
It's a gun, see above. Nothing simultaneous about it, one piece of U-235 can be stationary.
How does the gun work? rails? powder?
Think cannons and cannonballs. It's a gun. 18th if not 17th Century technology.
Will that affect the shaped charges?
You seem to be confusing it with implosion-type plutonium bombs. Those are harder.
If anything is wrong, you have a very expensive dirty bomb, and you can't exactly test the thing, so you can't really know if it's as easy as you say it is.
The US was so sure that Little Boy (a U-235 gun-type bomb) would work they didn't even bother testing it before dropping it on Nagasaki. Fat Man (Pu implosion) they did test.
This is 60 year old technology, for pete's sake.
So in other words, you don't know either.
If Avalon might or might not be in Longhorn, and Longhorn isn't .net added to Windows, and Longhorn isn't WINFS, well ... exactly what IS Longhorn, anyway?
Um, Windows NT 5.2 ?