Well, if they're used for lift then they're not retrothrusters, now are they (BFG)? That's actually not a bad idea for moving on the surface of any low-grav planet, and jump jets were proposed for Moon vehicles back in the '70s. They are still too expensive in terms of fuel at this point, but for navigating rough terrain without flying (on the Moon aerodynamic flight is, of course, impossible) the designs look very promising. One of the best designs I saw involved a treaded vehicle with jump jets to hop over big obstacles, in much the same vein as the Battletech mechs. That way, you don't need as much fuel but you can get out of (and into) some very tight spots if need be.
> Lower gravitational force means you need less force to counteract it.
Since the original discussion was arresting forward motion after landing (this is a plane, so we're not talking about deorbiting), I'm not sure how you feel that a change in gravitation applies.
My vision for a manned Mars flyer always went more toward the idea of an ultralight, in the same vein as the trip down the axis of the vessel in Rendesvous with Rama, since I figured a large span, ultralight airframe was about the only device capable of steering within any safe distance. Thrust is still an issue (props don't work very well in thin air, after all) and the airship is fragile but at least you don't need to be moving at an insane speed to get off the ground, and an ejection from a damaged or out-of-control craft could be affected with a simple jetpack (jump from the craft and use the jetpack to touch down on your feet, ideally).
By the way, MTG refers to the game Magic: the Gathering from Wizards of the Coast. One of the cards in the game (a popular card when it was first printed) was an Ornithopter.
Virg
Re:Am I the only person...
on
Flying on Mars
·
· Score: 2
You probably are. Ornithopters are "mechanical birds" with flapping wings, like Da Vinci used to imagine. None of the proposed designs fits the name.
> So whats wrong with retro rockets 1/3 gravity should help here.
Lower gravity doesn't help with retrothrusters. Think mass, not weight. That said, retrorockets would work quite well, but they're very inefficient in terms of vehicle weight and cost and such. Arresting gear (his suggestion is a simple tailhook) is cheaper, less prone to failure and easier to maintain, which is why it's a better choice.
Even with perfect efficiency, you're still off. Assuming you can spin your rotors at 2000/3 RPM and still get enough lift, you've got two problems. First, the tail rotor would have to be MUCH bigger than a regular chopper lest your Marsocopter just pinwheel around when it lifts off. Second, and much more important, you're still missing on the whole lift problem, as helicopters use manipulation of lift to maneuver, and although gravity is lower inertia doesn't change with weight, only with mass. So, even assuming you can get the airframe stable, all you'd have is an airborne crane, because in 1% atmosphere the physics of the rotor collectives (made of any known material) would be impossibly hard to use without wild loss of control. On Earth it's hard enough to keep a helicopter stable. You'd have to give up so much fuel efficiency to maintain flightworthiness (with tapered and/or variable width rotor blades and the massive collective drives necessary to tip each of these big blades, plus the larger engines for the lift and tail rotors) that I can't imagine it would be worth the effort.
Two words in return: Faraday Cage. This deals with the big electromagnet as well. As for the junkyard magnet, you could just arrest or disable the crane operator before he could get it near the building.(bfg)
> I actually prefer Missile silos for ulitmate security.
Assuming you mean reusing old missle silos, it's a bad idea, for several reasons.
1.) The old silos were not designed to handle the electrical load that a datacenter requires.
2.) Missile silos are designed to protect against nuclear strike, but not much else. Foot soldiers would make short work of such facilities. Think heavier-than-air tear gas or burning jet fuel if you don't know why.
3.) Missile silos are generally full of asbestos and other nasty stuff that would be very costly to remove.
4.) Most missile silos have water leakage problems. This wasn't much of an issue when the only thing that got wet was the tail of the rocket booster, but computers are understandably less durable in such circumstances.
5.) Data connectivity was a non-concern then (they only needed a telephone, and then only until nuclear war began), so getting them wired would be prohibitive. Just about the only answer is satellite link, but that's not secure from destruction from the air.
6.) Missile silos were not siege-ready; that is, they didn't have weeks of supplies in case they were locked in. The assumption was that by the time they had a problem with supplies, the missile would have already launched.
To pick a nit, you mean "security through obscurity", not obfuscation. Obscurity means "nobody knows it's there." Obfuscation is creating confusion.
I say build it in the middle of a desert, six feet underground, under cover of night.
To which I say, satellites can see in the dark (the better to watch your construction, my dear), and they can also see these sorts of facilities six feet underground from the rather notable heat signature. Keep in mind, even if the facility is properly cooled, all that heat has to go somewhere, and the bleedoff point will give away the operation. It's the same method employed to find military bunkers in the desert. When a satellite looks down and sees a heat plume coming from nowhere, it's short work to investigate why.
This post is almost too dumb and paranoid to address, but I'll do it because it was fun to find the holes. Let's look at some of them.
1.) The money doesn't "ping" or anything else. It's not self-powered at all. You need to pass it through an EM field to get it to respond. Developing an EM field of sufficient power to activate these chips such that they'd be able to return a signal more than ten feet would (A) destroy the chip and (B) kill all of your houseplants and (C) require a generator bigger than the patrol car.
2.) Drug money doesn't spend time "outside the legitimate banking system" at all. This is one of the main reasons why money laundering is so popular. Having boxes of cash is a nice thought, but most crime figures don't like having liquid assets like that because it's fragile, easy to steal (if Boss X has $100,000.00 in a safe it's right difficult to tell that his bodyguard is skimming C notes) and it draws attention.
3.) Having cash is not a warrantable offense. There are those who will tell you horror stories about being detained for having lots of cash, but if you ask all of them to leave except the ones who were detained on a warrant you'd be a lonely person. The police driving by the house would need a warrant to drive by and check (if it were possible; see number 1 above) as radio communications are protected from illegal search unless they're detectable to the general public.
4.) Assuming for a moment that 1, 2 and 3 above were by some miracle suspended, here's the rub. Radio waves don't generally pass through safes. So, you could put said cash in a safe, and it would be, well, safe. Hell, if you're really worried, you could put it in a bucket of water.
Remember, just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean you're worth tracking.
Great scam! "Someone give me a stack of Euros and a reader, and I promise I'll spend my time trying to defeat the RFID tag!" More likely you'll be spending Euros and giggling at the goof who's waiting for your "test results".
> Big corporations are always screwing over the little guy, with their
> fine print, bait & switch tactics, political donations, advocacy advertising,
> EULAs, whatever. Why is it OK for them and not for me?
Well, it's not okay. For either of you. Whether or not they deserve to be screwed, you screwing them is still unethical. That said, them screwing you is also unethical.
I've been waiting for someone to come up with the Robin Hood metaphor, because on the surface it seems to apply to the situation, but in this circumstance it's a horribly skewed fit, and here's why.
1.) You didn't steal the software from Sheriff, you bought it, and in so doing, you agreed to the terms of the license. If you're going to steal, then by God, steal.
2.) Since when is there a God-given right to play the newest games? The Sheriff of Nottingham was taxing people to the point of starvation. Geek jokes notwithstanding, I've never seen anyone die of a Quake deficiency.
3.) There are free software packages available all over the 'Net, including games if that's your poison. It's not necessary to pirate to use any of them. And before you say, "there's no (insert name of newest game here) available free," I'll ask you to reread article 2.
4.) What the MPAA and RIAA do wrong doesn't make what you do wrong morally right, because they aren't forcing you to do anything in the first place. Again, to go back to the Robin Hood motif, the poor couldn't choose not to pay their taxes. You (and your poor friend) can choose not to play game X without serious injury.
In short, if you feel like sticking it to the Man, then do so, but don't try to bend the rationalization around so that I'll se your actions as morally justified. What you're doing isn't civil disobedience. It's just copyright infringement.
Take caution with the brainwashing there. One can use this argument to "borrow" someone's car if one intends to return it after use. Also, there's a fairly solid argument that at least some percentage of people using warez would buy the program if they didn't have access to it for free. So, theft of use is indeed different from theft of goods, but there are still ethical parallels to be considered.
You make a good point, but could you try to find a more confusing way to say it? Sheez, who uses "unto" anymore except televangelists?
Summary: Advances in technology (for making music) and the Internet (for advertising and distributing the music) have made recording contracts much less important. Artists should note that it's no longer necessary to sign a record contract to find success, and should avoid being fooled into thinking these technologies are bad for them.
Your post is a great effort, and I thought it was a good analogy to the recording industry, but there's a difference that time has introduced. Unlike your employer, musicians are finding it easier and easier to put together very high quality music by themselves than ever before. Thirty years ago, recording studios were the only way you could hope to put together a decend recording, and they were very expensive (and rightly so). So, the record label would sponsor a band's entry into the field by giving them money to record, with the stipulation that they pay back the investment (and a percentage of the profits) out of the money made from selling the record. As time passed, however, the labels got more and more profit-hungry and as technology gets cheaper, less and less relevant. Now, there's very little interms of investment standing in the way of producing very high quality music.
So, now I ask, if it's so cheap to produce good music, how come anyone signs a recording contract anymore? The reason is that they are now so large that they control the production channel, and so you can make your music on the cheap, but you can't afford to publish it yourself because:
1.) Most record stores are national chains, and few national chains will buy from indie labels, for the most part.
2.) Most radio stations get kickbacks from their playlist (this isn't an accusation of criminal activity; it's perfectly legal to pay for play) so if you aren't backed by a label you can't afford to buy a slot to get your song broadcast.
3.) Distribution centers (CD press facilities and such) charge a lot for small runs (again, rightly so, as it's more costly for them to do several small runs than one big one) so while making the music is cheap, making the CDs is expensive.
So, to bring it all home, your example would only hold if you could design the part yourself at home (my guess is your design equipment is a tad more costly than your run-of-the-mill home PC) and didn't need to work for them to use their manufacturing facilities (even if it cost you more). More importantly, your employer would need to make you sign a contract where he gives you pay, but then if the part doesn't sell X units you must make up the difference by paying him back. Not so nice anymore, is it?
Actually, this is a mis-report of what happened. The reason he stopped using "Prince" was because his contract with Time/Warner was so draconian that when he broke it, they claimed (successfully) that the very stage name "Prince" was their creation, so he wasn't allowed to perform or record under that name without TW's involvement. So, instead of bending over, he dumped his name in favor of the symbol until the contract expired. The press went with "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" because there was no way to pronounce the symbol. In one fairly entertaining vignette, he was being interviewed by Rosie O'Donnell, and it was hilarious to watch as he got visibly annoyed with her because she kept calling him "TAFKAP".
So anyway, even more kudos to him for not caving in.
Studio CDs should cost under $10USD, but live albums cost more to make, because it's not just a matter of setting up microphones to pick up the performance. In fact, the best live recordings are done by setting up two entire sound boards; one to handle the mixing down for the stage and to run the monitors, and the other for getting and storing the sound (both from the live board and from ambient mikes). So, the cost of a good live CD can easily be much more than the cost of producing in the studio,since the recording portion costs more and the post production is about the same.
The Monkees were assembled not as a misucal band but as a comedy team. Despite the fact that both Peter Tork and Mike Nesmith were musicians, they didn't play their own instruments on the show or in their recordings for several years. After several years of success due to the show, Mickey Dolenz started actually learning how to play the drums he'd been faking for years, and Davey Jones (who had a pretty good singing voice) started studying seriously.
The telling point is when the Monkees had a well-watched meeting with the Beatles ("The Fab Four Meets the Prefab Four!" shouted the headlines) John Lennon looked at Mickey Dolenz and said (paraphrase here; I don't remember the exact quote), "I finally get it. You're the Marx Brothers!"
So, in short, the Monkees were chosen by how well they worked as a comedy team, not for their musicianship. This makes them a bad example of a "manufactured band" since they weren't really intended to be a band at all. They just grew into the role. And yes, this also goes for the Partridge Family.
Well, I was thinking that if the "sacrifice story for action" motif was real, we'd see a lot of the fight in Rohan and less of the two Hobbits crossing over at Minas Morgul. It wouldn't break my heart to see more of Gimley bustin' heads, but it would take something away from the whole "Hobbits as children growing up" theme.
> Especially that clip of him asking "Do you have the ring", it seemed too intense on the preview.
You need to remember that in this scene, the Ring really, really wanted to be in Gandalf's posession, and Gandalf really, really wanted the ring, and only through supreme effort (and telling Frodo never to offer him the Ring again) was he able to resist its corrupting influence. You'll find on reading the book that the image of everyone who asks Frodo this question calls to mind a bit of wide-eyed, lip-licking overattention. Remember, the Ring corrupted everyone who touched it (and even some who didn't), with the sole exception of Tom Bombadil.
Slashdot Mirror
> How is this informative? all he did was quote from the article.
Well, since nobody on Slashdot reads the articles before commenting on them...
Virg
Go back to the OED and look up "joke", and then carry on for real.
Virg
The opposite of disgruntled is engruntled.
Carry on.
Virg
Well, if they're used for lift then they're not retrothrusters, now are they (BFG)? That's actually not a bad idea for moving on the surface of any low-grav planet, and jump jets were proposed for Moon vehicles back in the '70s. They are still too expensive in terms of fuel at this point, but for navigating rough terrain without flying (on the Moon aerodynamic flight is, of course, impossible) the designs look very promising. One of the best designs I saw involved a treaded vehicle with jump jets to hop over big obstacles, in much the same vein as the Battletech mechs. That way, you don't need as much fuel but you can get out of (and into) some very tight spots if need be.
Virg
> Lower gravitational force means you need less force to counteract it.
Since the original discussion was arresting forward motion after landing (this is a plane, so we're not talking about deorbiting), I'm not sure how you feel that a change in gravitation applies.
Virg
My vision for a manned Mars flyer always went more toward the idea of an ultralight, in the same vein as the trip down the axis of the vessel in Rendesvous with Rama, since I figured a large span, ultralight airframe was about the only device capable of steering within any safe distance. Thrust is still an issue (props don't work very well in thin air, after all) and the airship is fragile but at least you don't need to be moving at an insane speed to get off the ground, and an ejection from a damaged or out-of-control craft could be affected with a simple jetpack (jump from the craft and use the jetpack to touch down on your feet, ideally).
By the way, MTG refers to the game Magic: the Gathering from Wizards of the Coast. One of the cards in the game (a popular card when it was first printed) was an Ornithopter.
Virg
You probably are. Ornithopters are "mechanical birds" with flapping wings, like Da Vinci used to imagine. None of the proposed designs fits the name.
Admit it, you're just a MTG junkie, aren't you?
Virg
> Since when is it not safe to use hydrogen? Since someone was
> stupid enough to coat a hydrogen-filled dirigible with thermite?
Um, yeah, right about then. (BFG)
Virg
> So whats wrong with retro rockets 1/3 gravity should help here.
Lower gravity doesn't help with retrothrusters. Think mass, not weight. That said, retrorockets would work quite well, but they're very inefficient in terms of vehicle weight and cost and such. Arresting gear (his suggestion is a simple tailhook) is cheaper, less prone to failure and easier to maintain, which is why it's a better choice.
Virg
Even with perfect efficiency, you're still off. Assuming you can spin your rotors at 2000/3 RPM and still get enough lift, you've got two problems. First, the tail rotor would have to be MUCH bigger than a regular chopper lest your Marsocopter just pinwheel around when it lifts off. Second, and much more important, you're still missing on the whole lift problem, as helicopters use manipulation of lift to maneuver, and although gravity is lower inertia doesn't change with weight, only with mass. So, even assuming you can get the airframe stable, all you'd have is an airborne crane, because in 1% atmosphere the physics of the rotor collectives (made of any known material) would be impossibly hard to use without wild loss of control. On Earth it's hard enough to keep a helicopter stable. You'd have to give up so much fuel efficiency to maintain flightworthiness (with tapered and/or variable width rotor blades and the massive collective drives necessary to tip each of these big blades, plus the larger engines for the lift and tail rotors) that I can't imagine it would be worth the effort.
Virg
> 3 Letters.... E M P
Two words in return: Faraday Cage. This deals with the big electromagnet as well. As for the junkyard magnet, you could just arrest or disable the crane operator before he could get it near the building.(bfg)
Virg
> I actually prefer Missile silos for ulitmate security.
Assuming you mean reusing old missle silos, it's a bad idea, for several reasons.
1.) The old silos were not designed to handle the electrical load that a datacenter requires.
2.) Missile silos are designed to protect against nuclear strike, but not much else. Foot soldiers would make short work of such facilities. Think heavier-than-air tear gas or burning jet fuel if you don't know why.
3.) Missile silos are generally full of asbestos and other nasty stuff that would be very costly to remove.
4.) Most missile silos have water leakage problems. This wasn't much of an issue when the only thing that got wet was the tail of the rocket booster, but computers are understandably less durable in such circumstances.
5.) Data connectivity was a non-concern then (they only needed a telephone, and then only until nuclear war began), so getting them wired would be prohibitive. Just about the only answer is satellite link, but that's not secure from destruction from the air.
6.) Missile silos were not siege-ready; that is, they didn't have weeks of supplies in case they were locked in. The assumption was that by the time they had a problem with supplies, the missile would have already launched.
Virg
To pick a nit, you mean "security through obscurity", not obfuscation. Obscurity means "nobody knows it's there." Obfuscation is creating confusion.
I say build it in the middle of a desert, six feet underground, under cover of night.
To which I say, satellites can see in the dark (the better to watch your construction, my dear), and they can also see these sorts of facilities six feet underground from the rather notable heat signature. Keep in mind, even if the facility is properly cooled, all that heat has to go somewhere, and the bleedoff point will give away the operation. It's the same method employed to find military bunkers in the desert. When a satellite looks down and sees a heat plume coming from nowhere, it's short work to investigate why.
Virg
This post is almost too dumb and paranoid to address, but I'll do it because it was fun to find the holes. Let's look at some of them.
1.) The money doesn't "ping" or anything else. It's not self-powered at all. You need to pass it through an EM field to get it to respond. Developing an EM field of sufficient power to activate these chips such that they'd be able to return a signal more than ten feet would (A) destroy the chip and (B) kill all of your houseplants and (C) require a generator bigger than the patrol car.
2.) Drug money doesn't spend time "outside the legitimate banking system" at all. This is one of the main reasons why money laundering is so popular. Having boxes of cash is a nice thought, but most crime figures don't like having liquid assets like that because it's fragile, easy to steal (if Boss X has $100,000.00 in a safe it's right difficult to tell that his bodyguard is skimming C notes) and it draws attention.
3.) Having cash is not a warrantable offense. There are those who will tell you horror stories about being detained for having lots of cash, but if you ask all of them to leave except the ones who were detained on a warrant you'd be a lonely person. The police driving by the house would need a warrant to drive by and check (if it were possible; see number 1 above) as radio communications are protected from illegal search unless they're detectable to the general public.
4.) Assuming for a moment that 1, 2 and 3 above were by some miracle suspended, here's the rub. Radio waves don't generally pass through safes. So, you could put said cash in a safe, and it would be, well, safe. Hell, if you're really worried, you could put it in a bucket of water.
Remember, just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean you're worth tracking.
Virg
Great scam! "Someone give me a stack of Euros and a reader, and I promise I'll spend my time trying to defeat the RFID tag!" More likely you'll be spending Euros and giggling at the goof who's waiting for your "test results".
Virg
> Big corporations are always screwing over the little guy, with their
> fine print, bait & switch tactics, political donations, advocacy advertising,
> EULAs, whatever. Why is it OK for them and not for me?
Well, it's not okay. For either of you. Whether or not they deserve to be screwed, you screwing them is still unethical. That said, them screwing you is also unethical.
Get it now? Carry on.
Virg
I've been waiting for someone to come up with the Robin Hood metaphor, because on the surface it seems to apply to the situation, but in this circumstance it's a horribly skewed fit, and here's why.
1.) You didn't steal the software from Sheriff, you bought it, and in so doing, you agreed to the terms of the license. If you're going to steal, then by God, steal.
2.) Since when is there a God-given right to play the newest games? The Sheriff of Nottingham was taxing people to the point of starvation. Geek jokes notwithstanding, I've never seen anyone die of a Quake deficiency.
3.) There are free software packages available all over the 'Net, including games if that's your poison. It's not necessary to pirate to use any of them. And before you say, "there's no (insert name of newest game here) available free," I'll ask you to reread article 2.
4.) What the MPAA and RIAA do wrong doesn't make what you do wrong morally right, because they aren't forcing you to do anything in the first place. Again, to go back to the Robin Hood motif, the poor couldn't choose not to pay their taxes. You (and your poor friend) can choose not to play game X without serious injury.
In short, if you feel like sticking it to the Man, then do so, but don't try to bend the rationalization around so that I'll se your actions as morally justified. What you're doing isn't civil disobedience. It's just copyright infringement.
Virg
Take caution with the brainwashing there. One can use this argument to "borrow" someone's car if one intends to return it after use. Also, there's a fairly solid argument that at least some percentage of people using warez would buy the program if they didn't have access to it for free. So, theft of use is indeed different from theft of goods, but there are still ethical parallels to be considered.
Virg
You make a good point, but could you try to find a more confusing way to say it? Sheez, who uses "unto" anymore except televangelists?
Summary: Advances in technology (for making music) and the Internet (for advertising and distributing the music) have made recording contracts much less important. Artists should note that it's no longer necessary to sign a record contract to find success, and should avoid being fooled into thinking these technologies are bad for them.
There now, that's better.
Virg
Your post is a great effort, and I thought it was a good analogy to the recording industry, but there's a difference that time has introduced. Unlike your employer, musicians are finding it easier and easier to put together very high quality music by themselves than ever before. Thirty years ago, recording studios were the only way you could hope to put together a decend recording, and they were very expensive (and rightly so). So, the record label would sponsor a band's entry into the field by giving them money to record, with the stipulation that they pay back the investment (and a percentage of the profits) out of the money made from selling the record. As time passed, however, the labels got more and more profit-hungry and as technology gets cheaper, less and less relevant. Now, there's very little interms of investment standing in the way of producing very high quality music.
So, now I ask, if it's so cheap to produce good music, how come anyone signs a recording contract anymore? The reason is that they are now so large that they control the production channel, and so you can make your music on the cheap, but you can't afford to publish it yourself because:
1.) Most record stores are national chains, and few national chains will buy from indie labels, for the most part.
2.) Most radio stations get kickbacks from their playlist (this isn't an accusation of criminal activity; it's perfectly legal to pay for play) so if you aren't backed by a label you can't afford to buy a slot to get your song broadcast.
3.) Distribution centers (CD press facilities and such) charge a lot for small runs (again, rightly so, as it's more costly for them to do several small runs than one big one) so while making the music is cheap, making the CDs is expensive.
So, to bring it all home, your example would only hold if you could design the part yourself at home (my guess is your design equipment is a tad more costly than your run-of-the-mill home PC) and didn't need to work for them to use their manufacturing facilities (even if it cost you more). More importantly, your employer would need to make you sign a contract where he gives you pay, but then if the part doesn't sell X units you must make up the difference by paying him back. Not so nice anymore, is it?
Virg
Actually, this is a mis-report of what happened. The reason he stopped using "Prince" was because his contract with Time/Warner was so draconian that when he broke it, they claimed (successfully) that the very stage name "Prince" was their creation, so he wasn't allowed to perform or record under that name without TW's involvement. So, instead of bending over, he dumped his name in favor of the symbol until the contract expired. The press went with "The Artist Formerly Known as Prince" because there was no way to pronounce the symbol. In one fairly entertaining vignette, he was being interviewed by Rosie O'Donnell, and it was hilarious to watch as he got visibly annoyed with her because she kept calling him "TAFKAP".
So anyway, even more kudos to him for not caving in.
Virg
Studio CDs should cost under $10USD, but live albums cost more to make, because it's not just a matter of setting up microphones to pick up the performance. In fact, the best live recordings are done by setting up two entire sound boards; one to handle the mixing down for the stage and to run the monitors, and the other for getting and storing the sound (both from the live board and from ambient mikes). So, the cost of a good live CD can easily be much more than the cost of producing in the studio,since the recording portion costs more and the post production is about the same.
Virg
The Monkees were assembled not as a misucal band but as a comedy team. Despite the fact that both Peter Tork and Mike Nesmith were musicians, they didn't play their own instruments on the show or in their recordings for several years. After several years of success due to the show, Mickey Dolenz started actually learning how to play the drums he'd been faking for years, and Davey Jones (who had a pretty good singing voice) started studying seriously.
The telling point is when the Monkees had a well-watched meeting with the Beatles ("The Fab Four Meets the Prefab Four!" shouted the headlines) John Lennon looked at Mickey Dolenz and said (paraphrase here; I don't remember the exact quote), "I finally get it. You're the Marx Brothers!"
So, in short, the Monkees were chosen by how well they worked as a comedy team, not for their musicianship. This makes them a bad example of a "manufactured band" since they weren't really intended to be a band at all. They just grew into the role. And yes, this also goes for the Partridge Family.
Virg
Well, I was thinking that if the "sacrifice story for action" motif was real, we'd see a lot of the fight in Rohan and less of the two Hobbits crossing over at Minas Morgul. It wouldn't break my heart to see more of Gimley bustin' heads, but it would take something away from the whole "Hobbits as children growing up" theme.
Virg
> Especially that clip of him asking "Do you have the ring", it seemed too intense on the preview.
You need to remember that in this scene, the Ring really, really wanted to be in Gandalf's posession, and Gandalf really, really wanted the ring, and only through supreme effort (and telling Frodo never to offer him the Ring again) was he able to resist its corrupting influence. You'll find on reading the book that the image of everyone who asks Frodo this question calls to mind a bit of wide-eyed, lip-licking overattention. Remember, the Ring corrupted everyone who touched it (and even some who didn't), with the sole exception of Tom Bombadil.
Virg