Electricity, Newton's Cradle and field effects
on
The Dot in .mars
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· Score: 1
Isn't this how electricity works? When you put current into a wire, you are adding electrons on one end and removing them on the other, but it is not the same electrons.
Electricity is 'faster than light' in that, when you turn on a generator, electrons can flow throughout the circuit instantaneously, without 'filling up' the wires with charge.
This is the same as the Newton's Cradle executive toy where you drop one ball on one side and it's momentum bumps up a ball on the other side.
So the point stands, there is a significant delay in sending a signal between Earth and Mars. But, if the existing medium between the two can be manipulated, and the effect of that manipulation be observed and decoded, the communication delay might be overcome.
Are variances in magnetic or gravitational fields instantaneous?
What's asked is how we could return the world to the current state of computerization:
1. Get lots and lots (and lots) of monkeys.
2. Get lots and lots (and lots) of typewriters.
3. Get lots and lots (and lots) of office space, preferably in Redmond.
4. Issue a decree requiring all consumers of monkey dung and associated by-products to send a tithe of their hard earned money to Redmond (c/o Monkey)
o/~ Bye-bye little can in the sky
We have a new one up in orbit so we don't care if you fry
All those Russkies are sure to let out a big sigh
On the day when old Mir say goodbye
The extinction you refer to is also theorized to have been caused by the stagnation of the Earth's oceans. This is believed to have caused global algae blooms which wiped out virtually all life in the seas (which was all the life there was at the time.
An even more interesting catastrophe is the collision with our then closest neighbor, which created the Moon. This planet, called Oberon IIRC, was supposedly located between the orbits of old Earth and Mars, and intersected the orbit of Earth.
At one point, old Earth and Oberon grazed each other, liquefying most of both planets and spinning a lump of rock off into orbit. The lump became the moon. The Discovery Channel devoted most of their "What if we had no Moon" program to this theory.
It is also speculated that the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is the remnant of another such collision, where the planets involved did much more than graze each other.
Which is exactly what the MPAA is exploring with the Region Codes on DVDs, and why DeCSS is such a burr in their arse. The MPAA wants customers to only buy 'approved' DVD players which let them enforce content control - and they rabidly squelch any alternatives (actually not all, only those with potential to break their control).
The same will happen with all these purported GPS-enabled devices. They'll become predominant in the market-place, and they'll be hyped up with the 'gee-wizz' factor of a location-aware toaster and what not.. Maybe they'll sell this 'feature' as a means of 'protecting your property against thefot', or maybe just having a microchip in things will make sheeple buy them.
After there's enough market penetration, the crack-down against alternatives will start.
No signal, not device. If you do not put a GPS antena on the side of your house - or in some other way give the device a clear view of the signals, none of your toys will work. It's in your best interest to not tamper with this system, once in place.
This doesn't hinder free trade at all. It let's the manufacturers completely control supply to certain areas. Free trade is not about freedom, don't let the wording throw you.
How intriguing.. Now you can be insured only for certain States or areas... If you cross the State line into New Jersey, where you are not insured... putt, putt, sputter, stop!
Better still, your premium can be billed by how much, and how fast, you drive. If you think that having your telephone billed by the second was neat, wait until Allstate and Geiko make GPS transcievers a mandatory feature of being their client.
Things to watch for: A deal between Microsoft and Toshiba that renders Office XP useless on Toshiba laptops when taken into countries where Microsoft software is known to be pirated.
Sheesh! And you guys call yourself 'geeks'. The obvious thing to do is to build facilities where these bacteria will work along-side nanites which will take individual C atoms and arrange them into diamonds. Some of these diamonds will be already pre-cut and mounted in nice solitaire settings. Others will be glued together (using the corpese of deceased bacteria) into ginding wheels and onto carbon-tipped industrial tools.
Do you think that slashdot is now at, or at least near, critical mass - considering that it is posting interviews with it's own staff on the front page of the site?
Don't you thin kthat it is a little self-serving to do so in anything but a special interest portion of the site?
What's next on the agenda? Slashdot banner ads promoting Slashdot? Wouldn't that be, oh so AOL?
The obvious response to this is 'how do we get it back to Earth?', and while this is a valid question, it's extremely near-sighted.
Earth has adequate resources for terrestrial needs. (See where I'm going?) But, if we were to ever build anything in space, or on the moon, then we would have to carry materials to the construction site. (Now you see where I'm going.)
Mining asteroids would make plentiful raw materials available more cheaply. Have you priced the cost of lifting a pound of aluminium into orbit? With the realistic prospect of asteroid mining, all we would have to do is launch and assemble a refining/manufacturing plant into space.
Once there, if cleverly managed, it could be used to make whatever we need. It's the old 'teach a man to fish' approach. Once we can process raw materials in space, the cost of lifting a refinery there would be recovered very quickly.
An orbiting (or travelling) refinery could make all sorts of interesting alloys that we can not make on Earth. It could make replacement parts as necessary, or build new pieces not thought of at the beginning of a mission. It could even make better use of physics to shape parts in new ways (rotation, acceleration). Such 'natural' shapes, created under gravitationally controlled conditions, just might prove to have very desirable properties.
A space-bourne refinery could be nuclear-powered without the risks of killing people or polluting the environment. It could use focused sunlight to weld parts together. Several small plants might be assembled together to make very large assemblies that we could never hoist into space (Spacedock?) from the Earth.
Gutted asteroids might become the fuselages of future spaceships, with the engines and such structures built from the materials dug out of that asteroid.
Ultimately, the point is that anything, anything at all, that gets us out there, is a Good Thing. If robotic mining and the greed for asteroid-dug diamonds is what prompts the first step, so be it.
Well, during atmospheric entry, some of the membranes undergo a chemical change that converts them into little Von Neumann factories, which then assemble the remaining membranes into more biologically friendly forms. They then convert themselves into the fundamental building blocks of nucleii and let time take it's course. The exposure to Oxygen and Solar radiation is analogous to the compilation of instructions.
The whole process is a grand plan put in place by an ancient master race/God to seed the Universe with life. The process of evolution is actually a computer program, the result of which is a species capable of repeating the process - sort of like a program whose output is its own source code. As a failsafe, built into the program is a feature that compells any species to pollute its environment to the point where it eventually must move on to a new place.
I don't think it is. Improved marketting is improved through deeper invasion into consumer privacy. More databases are bought and more data-mining is done. Sophisticated consumer profiling is where 'improved targetting' comes from. I don't want my auto insurance company to know that I used my VISA to buy Bondo and paint - do you?
1. True enough, I can't argue with the convenience of throwing it out once per day. Now, if only my Post Office would offer a mail-filtering option, a real-time black hole list and an auto-responder, that would be nice.
2. Lower cost bulk rate? The stamps I put on the NON-postage-paid envelopes in which I send in my payments just went up by 3%.. That 'lower cost bulk rate' is what SHOULD have absorbed that extra penny, not my mail. This way, I would get lower cost mail, and they might have some incentive to send out less junk. In my favorite wet-dream, I get to send my payments in pre-paid envelopes - but that's just a dream.
3. There should be a law requiring that all junk mail be printed on butt-friendly, quilted and scented tissues. That way, I could save money on toilet paper.
They'll lose sales, eventually. I'd rather keep that price from rising in the first place.
And, as the costs rise, the passed-along cost takes the trend into account. So the increase is greater than the cost, and so there is profit made by the 'evil corporation' we're trying to subdue.
It's battling windmills. A better approach is to organize consumers, educate them, and get them to commit to a boycott. It drives the point home without costing the consumer additional money.
Organizing boycotts takes time and effort, while putting junk in a 'pre-paid' envelope gives a sense of immediate satisfaction. Satisfaction feels good, but it really isn't effective. It's like swearing at your boss - you vent and feel better, but it's costing you in the long run. If you want to save consumers money, don't advocate something the cost of which just gets passed down to consumers anyway.
Instead, write your legislators and voice your outrage. And while you have their attention, ask them to explain the double-taxation practice of charging an Income tax, and a Sales tax on the same money.
First of all, my point goes beyond the costs to the individual. If the cost of 'doing business' for a company goes up, it is passed down to all customers of that company. Spank me and call me a Socialist if you must.
Second, I have a hard time believing that you could buy a car, furniture, applicances, or a decent computer, and pay it off within one month. You ought to write a book on financial responsibility - I would gladly buy it.
"Free" offers are bunk, no argument, but the interest fees, transfer fees, and fees to retailers are where the money goes.
IIRC, a credit card transaction costs the retailer 3-5% of the price paid by the consumer. When VISA's cost of doing business goes up (due to 'pre-paid' retribution) they hike up their interest rates (which hurts me directly) and increase the transaction charge to the retailer - who in turn raises prices to maintain his profit margin - which hurts me transitively.
As for junk-mail from companies you do not do business with... If you have a VISA card, you will get mail from all sorts of banks which offer a VISA card, not just from your bank - it's still VISA. Your contact info got sold to many other businesses as well - but you already knew that. Now, these businesses have customers who bear the brunt of 'pre-paid' retribution; so is it so hard to accept that when someone retaliates this way against a company with which you do business, your costs go up in response?
I'm not talking about a direct cause and effect involving the individual, but rather more holistically, in a distributed fashion. 'Pre-paid' retribution takes more money out of consumer pockets in general, making the whole class of junk-mailing companies richer, not just a specific one.
Think for a second. Who actually pays postage on those 'postage paid' envelopes?
Most junk mail I get comes from companies with which I do business in some way.. Usually, it's credit card companies or software companies of some kind.
The junk mail is paid for in my fees, and in the price of my software.
Sending back 'postage paid' envelopes is the same sort of near-sighted temper tantrum as openning the windows in your apartment and turning up the heat - because it's 'included' in your rent. It's the same as putting a telemarketter on hold, rather than just hanging up. It's like leaving your TV on all day, because you pay for cable 24/7, but can't be there to watch it.
If you want to protest, call the company, or at least include a letter asking them to switch to a 'solicited mailings only' scheme. Otherwise you're just wasting your own (and others' like you) money.
The kid may have just gotten some images from the Official site, and doctored them with photoshop, to (for example) portray police officials in an 'obscene' context.
Imagine this: The original picture shows the Commissioner bending down over a table, signing an ordinance. The retouched image has the mayor sodomizing the Comish.
Now, the images certainly are 'computer systems information'. The new graphic is arguably obscene. By showing something false, it is arguably 'misuse'...
Depending on how puritanical the courts that hear this, and whether or not the ACLU gets involved, the police will either lose this, or the kid will get a wrist slapping.
It's small town ignorance. The only reason it's even on/. is because it's about a 'repressed' kid and computers. Bah!
Bluetooth doesn't give me unmetered always-on access to the internet. Why do I want it again?
Well, there's much more to 'wireless connectivity' than Internet access, for one. Ricochet is a 'dial-up' means, but wireless includes Personal Area Networks - so you can dial your cell phone from your PDA without the two touching; so you could print from your Palm w/o first transferring files to a PC, or plugging it in to a printer; so you could synch with your PC from across the room or swap info Palm to Palm without routing your packets through the ISP's of the people involved. Such non-Internet uses are probably the biggest reason for Bluetooth - though there are alternatives to BT for these uses as well.
Palm could use Ricochet for Internet access, but why? If a Ricochet device can be fitted with Bluetooth, then BT can serve an an effective way of getting a Palm to use Ricochet. PDA's live in a resource-scarce world, and the fewer features they have to provide the better - less storage for the programs, less hardware (marginally, but still, different types of transmission need different support), faster processing and less battery drain.
For purposes of Ricochet on a Palm, they're much more likely to arrive as a snap-on MODEM unit, or a Handspring Springboard module than native support.
Another reason very well may be that Ricochet is more strictly controlled by it's company than Bluetooth. BT isn't completely 'open' either, but it's less dependant on licensing, since it is a consortium standard instead of a product.
Yet another reason is the bit-rate and range - which do matter together as well as separately. Wireless is by definition a 'shared medium', and as such, the less time you use to send data, the less likely you are to have it corrupted by someone else. The faster you can pump out the data, the more data you can send per burst. This isn't really a big deal in a sparse area, but you also have to consider the effective range of the device.
Bluetooth is a short range transmission, where you'd likely hand off to a more potent (probably wire-bound) medium. Ricochet, IIRC, is longer distance and your sole link to a central location shared by other users.
Both technologies use collision avoidance, spread-spectrum transmission and other tricks to optimise their use of the medium, so in this they can be considered equal; and so it boils down to the number of users in your xmit area (the smaller the area, the fewer users) and the rate at which you move data (the faster, the better due to lower likelyhood of cut-off).
Density is matter per unit volume. Gravity depends on the amount of mass. Jupiter, a very massive but not very dense planet has significant atmosphere. In fact, that's all it is - like the Solar System's best restaurant, it's all ambiance.
Ceres is, per unit volume, quite a bit more dense than Jupiter - but it has many fewer units of volume until all it's mass is accounted for. So it is much less massive than Jupiter, and therefore has a much lesser gravity - hence no ability to retain an atmosphere.
It is the gravity of a body than keeps it's gravity from floating off into space, not it's density. Density can only be viewed as playing a role when the two bodies are of similar volume, at which point a greater density is a sign of greater mass - not vice versa.
To put it another way, density and gravity both depend on mass. Density also depends on volume within which the mass is contained.
I'm not sure of the accuracy of the following (maybe an astronomy geek can back me up) but if you were to take the mass of the Earth, and distribute it over ten thousand times the volume - making a nebula - it would be just as able to retain it's atmosphere as it is now.
I don't mean to be pedantic, but I've never heard that term before. IANAChemist, but IIRC, camphor is a specific compound, while the behaviour you describe is typically refered to as sublimation. Is 'camphorisation' used in scientific texts or is it an ad hoc descriptive?
If someone from Microsoft hears you say that, they will make sure that the 1.5Gh P-IV runs just as slow as my P-I 150Mh... Imagine all the bloated overhead code responsible for that feature on Windows 2002...
I've worked on non-critical informational systems for US-made nuclear plants. (Critical systems are so automated that you are informed as an "Oh, BTW!" not "Do something now!" message)
Audible, and visual warnings are remarkably effective when they are well implemented. The problem is that bad things rarely happen individually, and a queue is often used to store multiple alarms. So if you have a ding-ding-bong-ding-bong-ding sequence, where dings are not as severe as bongs, you tend to get confused. It's a lot like playing Simon, where eventually the sequence overwhelms you.
What needs to be done is some kind of prioritization of the alarms, so the more critical ones could be accessed more simply - but the powers that be tend not to trust automated systems, and prefer to have a confused human making decisions.
The personal shields are more than adequately explained in both the movie and the series. In both, you have the training sessions with Gurney - as another poster mentioned.
In the movie, you see a battle with the Sardaukar, in which you get to see a 'slow-bullet' screw it's way through the shield and into a person's head.
In the series, Paul makes a point of saying "Fast on defense, slow on attack" as he slowly pushes his blade through Gurney's shield.
Missing these points means that the viewer wasn't paying attention.
As for Chani, she was definitelly a major character in the series - much more so than in the movie - and as such, was robbed of a well deserved introductory credit.
W.r.t. lack of technology.. This has always bothered my about Dune as a concept. Spacecraft, but no computers. Ornithopters and craft that will put you into orbit with willful avoidance of all but the simplest technology, just never really clicked for me. The movie and series don't need explanation - they are science Fiction after all, but the concept always bugged me. I accept it as part of Herbert's world, but I just find it unpleasant.
I would have mounted it inside a toilet seat.
The idea of a coworker getting up from a newspaper break to the sound of "You've got mail!" plop-plop, is just fall-down-fuuny to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I guess that answers THAT question.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
Electricity is 'faster than light' in that, when you turn on a generator, electrons can flow throughout the circuit instantaneously, without 'filling up' the wires with charge.
This is the same as the Newton's Cradle executive toy where you drop one ball on one side and it's momentum bumps up a ball on the other side.
So the point stands, there is a significant delay in sending a signal between Earth and Mars. But, if the existing medium between the two can be manipulated, and the effect of that manipulation be observed and decoded, the communication delay might be overcome.
Are variances in magnetic or gravitational fields instantaneous?
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
What's asked is how we could return the world to the current state of computerization:
1. Get lots and lots (and lots) of monkeys.
2. Get lots and lots (and lots) of typewriters.
3. Get lots and lots (and lots) of office space, preferably in Redmond.
4. Issue a decree requiring all consumers of monkey dung and associated by-products to send a tithe of their hard earned money to Redmond (c/o Monkey)
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
We have a new one up in orbit so we don't care if you fry
All those Russkies are sure to let out a big sigh
On the day when old Mir say goodbye
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
An even more interesting catastrophe is the collision with our then closest neighbor, which created the Moon. This planet, called Oberon IIRC, was supposedly located between the orbits of old Earth and Mars, and intersected the orbit of Earth.
At one point, old Earth and Oberon grazed each other, liquefying most of both planets and spinning a lump of rock off into orbit. The lump became the moon. The Discovery Channel devoted most of their "What if we had no Moon" program to this theory.
It is also speculated that the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is the remnant of another such collision, where the planets involved did much more than graze each other.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The same will happen with all these purported GPS-enabled devices. They'll become predominant in the market-place, and they'll be hyped up with the 'gee-wizz' factor of a location-aware toaster and what not.. Maybe they'll sell this 'feature' as a means of 'protecting your property against thefot', or maybe just having a microchip in things will make sheeple buy them.
After there's enough market penetration, the crack-down against alternatives will start.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
Better still, your premium can be billed by how much, and how fast, you drive. If you think that having your telephone billed by the second was neat, wait until Allstate and Geiko make GPS transcievers a mandatory feature of being their client.
Things to watch for: A deal between Microsoft and Toshiba that renders Office XP useless on Toshiba laptops when taken into countries where Microsoft software is known to be pirated.
How absolutely fascinating.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
Haven't you all read 3001, or the Diamond Age?
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
Do you think that slashdot is now at, or at least near, critical mass - considering that it is posting interviews with it's own staff on the front page of the site?
Don't you thin kthat it is a little self-serving to do so in anything but a special interest portion of the site?
What's next on the agenda? Slashdot banner ads promoting Slashdot? Wouldn't that be, oh so AOL?
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
Earth has adequate resources for terrestrial needs. (See where I'm going?) But, if we were to ever build anything in space, or on the moon, then we would have to carry materials to the construction site. (Now you see where I'm going.)
Mining asteroids would make plentiful raw materials available more cheaply. Have you priced the cost of lifting a pound of aluminium into orbit? With the realistic prospect of asteroid mining, all we would have to do is launch and assemble a refining/manufacturing plant into space.
Once there, if cleverly managed, it could be used to make whatever we need. It's the old 'teach a man to fish' approach. Once we can process raw materials in space, the cost of lifting a refinery there would be recovered very quickly.
An orbiting (or travelling) refinery could make all sorts of interesting alloys that we can not make on Earth. It could make replacement parts as necessary, or build new pieces not thought of at the beginning of a mission. It could even make better use of physics to shape parts in new ways (rotation, acceleration). Such 'natural' shapes, created under gravitationally controlled conditions, just might prove to have very desirable properties.
A space-bourne refinery could be nuclear-powered without the risks of killing people or polluting the environment. It could use focused sunlight to weld parts together. Several small plants might be assembled together to make very large assemblies that we could never hoist into space (Spacedock?) from the Earth.
Gutted asteroids might become the fuselages of future spaceships, with the engines and such structures built from the materials dug out of that asteroid.
Ultimately, the point is that anything, anything at all, that gets us out there, is a Good Thing. If robotic mining and the greed for asteroid-dug diamonds is what prompts the first step, so be it.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The whole process is a grand plan put in place by an ancient master race/God to seed the Universe with life. The process of evolution is actually a computer program, the result of which is a species capable of repeating the process - sort of like a program whose output is its own source code. As a failsafe, built into the program is a feature that compells any species to pollute its environment to the point where it eventually must move on to a new place.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
1. True enough, I can't argue with the convenience of throwing it out once per day. Now, if only my Post Office would offer a mail-filtering option, a real-time black hole list and an auto-responder, that would be nice.
2. Lower cost bulk rate? The stamps I put on the NON-postage-paid envelopes in which I send in my payments just went up by 3%.. That 'lower cost bulk rate' is what SHOULD have absorbed that extra penny, not my mail. This way, I would get lower cost mail, and they might have some incentive to send out less junk. In my favorite wet-dream, I get to send my payments in pre-paid envelopes - but that's just a dream.
3. There should be a law requiring that all junk mail be printed on butt-friendly, quilted and scented tissues. That way, I could save money on toilet paper.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
And, as the costs rise, the passed-along cost takes the trend into account. So the increase is greater than the cost, and so there is profit made by the 'evil corporation' we're trying to subdue.
It's battling windmills. A better approach is to organize consumers, educate them, and get them to commit to a boycott. It drives the point home without costing the consumer additional money.
Organizing boycotts takes time and effort, while putting junk in a 'pre-paid' envelope gives a sense of immediate satisfaction. Satisfaction feels good, but it really isn't effective. It's like swearing at your boss - you vent and feel better, but it's costing you in the long run. If you want to save consumers money, don't advocate something the cost of which just gets passed down to consumers anyway.
Instead, write your legislators and voice your outrage. And while you have their attention, ask them to explain the double-taxation practice of charging an Income tax, and a Sales tax on the same money.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
Second, I have a hard time believing that you could buy a car, furniture, applicances, or a decent computer, and pay it off within one month. You ought to write a book on financial responsibility - I would gladly buy it.
"Free" offers are bunk, no argument, but the interest fees, transfer fees, and fees to retailers are where the money goes.
IIRC, a credit card transaction costs the retailer 3-5% of the price paid by the consumer. When VISA's cost of doing business goes up (due to 'pre-paid' retribution) they hike up their interest rates (which hurts me directly) and increase the transaction charge to the retailer - who in turn raises prices to maintain his profit margin - which hurts me transitively.
As for junk-mail from companies you do not do business with... If you have a VISA card, you will get mail from all sorts of banks which offer a VISA card, not just from your bank - it's still VISA. Your contact info got sold to many other businesses as well - but you already knew that. Now, these businesses have customers who bear the brunt of 'pre-paid' retribution; so is it so hard to accept that when someone retaliates this way against a company with which you do business, your costs go up in response?
I'm not talking about a direct cause and effect involving the individual, but rather more holistically, in a distributed fashion. 'Pre-paid' retribution takes more money out of consumer pockets in general, making the whole class of junk-mailing companies richer, not just a specific one.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
Most junk mail I get comes from companies with which I do business in some way.. Usually, it's credit card companies or software companies of some kind.
The junk mail is paid for in my fees, and in the price of my software.
Sending back 'postage paid' envelopes is the same sort of near-sighted temper tantrum as openning the windows in your apartment and turning up the heat - because it's 'included' in your rent. It's the same as putting a telemarketter on hold, rather than just hanging up. It's like leaving your TV on all day, because you pay for cable 24/7, but can't be there to watch it.
If you want to protest, call the company, or at least include a letter asking them to switch to a 'solicited mailings only' scheme. Otherwise you're just wasting your own (and others' like you) money.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The kid may have just gotten some images from the Official site, and doctored them with photoshop, to (for example) portray police officials in an 'obscene' context.
Imagine this: The original picture shows the Commissioner bending down over a table, signing an ordinance. The retouched image has the mayor sodomizing the Comish.
Now, the images certainly are 'computer systems information'. The new graphic is arguably obscene. By showing something false, it is arguably 'misuse'...
Depending on how puritanical the courts that hear this, and whether or not the ACLU gets involved, the police will either lose this, or the kid will get a wrist slapping.
It's small town ignorance. The only reason it's even on
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
Well, there's much more to 'wireless connectivity' than Internet access, for one. Ricochet is a 'dial-up' means, but wireless includes Personal Area Networks - so you can dial your cell phone from your PDA without the two touching; so you could print from your Palm w/o first transferring files to a PC, or plugging it in to a printer; so you could synch with your PC from across the room or swap info Palm to Palm without routing your packets through the ISP's of the people involved. Such non-Internet uses are probably the biggest reason for Bluetooth - though there are alternatives to BT for these uses as well.
Palm could use Ricochet for Internet access, but why? If a Ricochet device can be fitted with Bluetooth, then BT can serve an an effective way of getting a Palm to use Ricochet. PDA's live in a resource-scarce world, and the fewer features they have to provide the better - less storage for the programs, less hardware (marginally, but still, different types of transmission need different support), faster processing and less battery drain.
For purposes of Ricochet on a Palm, they're much more likely to arrive as a snap-on MODEM unit, or a Handspring Springboard module than native support.
Another reason very well may be that Ricochet is more strictly controlled by it's company than Bluetooth. BT isn't completely 'open' either, but it's less dependant on licensing, since it is a consortium standard instead of a product.
Yet another reason is the bit-rate and range - which do matter together as well as separately. Wireless is by definition a 'shared medium', and as such, the less time you use to send data, the less likely you are to have it corrupted by someone else. The faster you can pump out the data, the more data you can send per burst. This isn't really a big deal in a sparse area, but you also have to consider the effective range of the device.
Bluetooth is a short range transmission, where you'd likely hand off to a more potent (probably wire-bound) medium. Ricochet, IIRC, is longer distance and your sole link to a central location shared by other users.
Both technologies use collision avoidance, spread-spectrum transmission and other tricks to optimise their use of the medium, so in this they can be considered equal; and so it boils down to the number of users in your xmit area (the smaller the area, the fewer users) and the rate at which you move data (the faster, the better due to lower likelyhood of cut-off).
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
Ceres is, per unit volume, quite a bit more dense than Jupiter - but it has many fewer units of volume until all it's mass is accounted for. So it is much less massive than Jupiter, and therefore has a much lesser gravity - hence no ability to retain an atmosphere.
It is the gravity of a body than keeps it's gravity from floating off into space, not it's density. Density can only be viewed as playing a role when the two bodies are of similar volume, at which point a greater density is a sign of greater mass - not vice versa.
To put it another way, density and gravity both depend on mass. Density also depends on volume within which the mass is contained.
I'm not sure of the accuracy of the following (maybe an astronomy geek can back me up) but if you were to take the mass of the Earth, and distribute it over ten thousand times the volume - making a nebula - it would be just as able to retain it's atmosphere as it is now.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
Audible, and visual warnings are remarkably effective when they are well implemented. The problem is that bad things rarely happen individually, and a queue is often used to store multiple alarms. So if you have a ding-ding-bong-ding-bong-ding sequence, where dings are not as severe as bongs, you tend to get confused. It's a lot like playing Simon, where eventually the sequence overwhelms you.
What needs to be done is some kind of prioritization of the alarms, so the more critical ones could be accessed more simply - but the powers that be tend not to trust automated systems, and prefer to have a confused human making decisions.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
In the movie, you see a battle with the Sardaukar, in which you get to see a 'slow-bullet' screw it's way through the shield and into a person's head.
In the series, Paul makes a point of saying "Fast on defense, slow on attack" as he slowly pushes his blade through Gurney's shield.
Missing these points means that the viewer wasn't paying attention.
As for Chani, she was definitelly a major character in the series - much more so than in the movie - and as such, was robbed of a well deserved introductory credit.
W.r.t. lack of technology.. This has always bothered my about Dune as a concept. Spacecraft, but no computers. Ornithopters and craft that will put you into orbit with willful avoidance of all but the simplest technology, just never really clicked for me. The movie and series don't need explanation - they are science Fiction after all, but the concept always bugged me. I accept it as part of Herbert's world, but I just find it unpleasant.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The idea of a coworker getting up from a newspaper break to the sound of "You've got mail!" plop-plop, is just fall-down-fuuny to me.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196