cooping it up as you go along means taking in air that was initially at rest and getting to move at the speed the engine is currently going.
One quibble:
Actually, the whole idea of the scramjet is that you don't boost the air up to the speed the engine is currently going. You burn the fuel in the air as it passes through the engine at supersonic speed. That's the "SC" in Supersonic Combustion Ramjet.
There are, of course, lots of practical difficulties; you listed some of them.
Gee, that's not what all the Anthropogenic Global Warming alarmists were saying in 2005. They were all shrieking "SEE! SEE!!! It's all George Bush's fault for not signing Kyoto!!!"
Every time there's a heat wave, the cries are "There it is!! *PROOF*!!!!"
When it's followed by a cold snap, it's "um, mumble mumble mumble".
The rule seems to be that any single year which fits the agenda is "Obviously A Trend." Any single year which fails to fit the agenda is "Well, a single year does not make a trend."
Though there's also the experience of a guy I knew in college in Alabama back in the late
70s -- An African-American man with a white wife, working as a systems administrator in the campus computer center.
He moved to a "oh-so-very-superior-pat-ourselves-on-the-back-for -being-so-very-tolerant-and-progressive" part of the country.
He moved back to Alabama.
He said that the percentage of racists and bigots was no less in the self-proclaimed "progressive" parts of the country. The racists and bigots there, though, would smile to your face and shake your hand, then knife you in the back when you least expected it. He said in Alabama, where the same percentage of bigots were up-front about it, they could be avoided. The majority who were friendly and shook your hand were being honest.
This whole process seems unnecessarily complex to me. React aluminum with water to get hydrogen to run in a IC engine or fuel cell?
If you're going to run the hydrogen in a fuel cell, what does this process do that makes it better than an aluminum-air battery? That seems to be a simpler and more direct use of the energy you get from oxidizing aluminum. I would think it would be more energy efficient.
We need judges with the gumption to say "Contempt of court for bringing such an egregiously frivolous case! Ninety days in jail! And double that for your slimy no-good excuse for a lawyer!"
I don't know about gas prices in the U.S. "being held artificially low". A good chunk of what you pay at the pump is gasoline taxes, plus sales taxes on the gas taxes. Rather, in many other countries, the gas taxes are much higher. Just try to get someone elected on a platform of adding several dollars per gallon of gas taxes. Or getting them re-elected if they ever try it.
That said, by "years to recoup investment in a hybrid" standards, current hybrids aren't a good investment. But I'd like to see them do well, because once a market in hybrids and pure electric vehicles is established, it's very likely to lead to vehicles which do make direct economic sense.
But it is not legal, when you buy Girl Scout cookies, to deduct the price as a contribution. Fees for goods or services are never tax deductible. You can't get around this by calling it a "contribution" if it's a fixed "contribution" for a particular good or service.
Unless you're a Scientologist.
This is the very ultra special tax break that Scientology members get - Fees for auditing, to the tune of (last I heard) $700/hour or so, are fully and completely tax deductible, in spite of a Supreme Court ruling that they were not. The IRS overruled the Supreme Court and said Scientology auditing fees were fully deductible in 1993.
Now, you may well ask, how come the IRS has the authority to overrule the Supreme Court? That is an extremely good question that I would really, really love to see answered.
This didn't make me lose faith in scientists or science. It would have made me lose faith in "science" "journalists", except for one factor -- I have zero faith in what passes for "science" "journalists" already, based on their apparent complete ignorance of science as shown by the unbelievable nonsense they report. This latest was just... same bozos, more crap.
Absolutely. According to my copy of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, "There is probably more available energy in the Earth's crust from thorium than from uranium and all fossil fuels put together."
But even short of that:
The cost the uranium fuel is a relatively tiny part of the cost of nuclear power. Double, triple, quadruple the price, and it's not going to make a huge difference. There's a whole lot of energy in a little bit of uranium.
The "shortage" is, more than anything else, an artifact of failure to reprocess wastes. Fuel rods have to be replaced, not because all the U235 has been fissioned, but because neutron-absorbing fission products have built up and started getting in the way. Only part of the fissile isotopes in the fuel is fissioned before the fuel rod has to be removed.
Reprocess, separate out the fission products, and put the remaining U238, U235, plutonium, and other actinides into new fuel rods, and available fuel expands by several times. This is before you even start thinking about breeder reactors.
Breeder reactors.
Back in the 1970s, the Japanese demonstrated a process to extract uranium from sea water using an ion exchange process, at a cost of about $200/pound in 1970 dollars. That could be considered a very long term ceiling on the price of uranium.
> Western Civilization... needs to take a break from bashing Christianity and recognize where the real danger lies.
But bashing Christianity is safe. You don't have to go into hiding.
You don't see many episodes of PETA throwing red paint on Hells Angels' leathers. Much safer to attack some elderly society matron. Same principle. (Or lack thereof.)
That's the thing that bugs me about this whole debate -- The constant drumbeat that THERE IS NO DISSENT -- THERE IS NO DISSENT -- THERE IS NO DISSENT -- then, when someone points out that there *is* dissent, they either stop up their ears, jump up and down and keep chanting THERE IS NO DISSENT -- THERE IS NO DISSENT -- THERE IS NO DISSENT -- or, as in this current discussion, they say "They are just saying this because they have been coopted by the EEEEEEVILE OIL COMPANIES WHO WANT TO DESTROY THE WORLD!!! (As if oil company executives didn't live on this planet, too. Many of them in low-lying cities like Houston.)
Pretending that dissent from The Received Dogma does not exist, when it manifestly does, is not science.
There is dissent from the "imminent disaster" dogma. Yes, there is some warming, yes, human activity probably has something to do with some part of it, but other human activities are probably resulting in some cooling. And all the warming is not due to human activity - Mars is warming, Europa is warming. Obviously those are not due to human activity.
And to say that the Union of Concerned Scientists, authors of this little "expose'", doesn't have their own agenda is... silly, at best.
Of a company called S-C-O, the tale I'll briefly tell With G-P-L, our software all is free Who turned their hands to barratry when software wouldn't sell Sailing through the legal straits of High Barratry
``And are you selling Linux or old Unixware?'' said we With GPL, our software all is free We're the owners of all Unix come demanding of our fee! Sailing through the legal straits of High Barratry
You've stolen code from System V and given it away With GPL, our software all is free So buy licences for Linux, or we'll sue and make you pay Sailing through the legal straits of High Barratry
They first sued IBM over a million lines of code With GPL, our software all is free Though a subroutine or two from BSD was all they showed Sailing through the legal straits of High Barratry
Well, RedHat sued them next so they went gunning for Novell With GPL, our software all is free Autozone and Daimler-Chrysler soon were on their list as well Sailing through the legal straits of High Barratry
Then lawsuit and lawsuit we fought for many a day With GPL, our software all is free 'Till the research done at Groklaw blew their cases clean away Sailing through the legal straits of High Barratry
Oh, please buy us out, the SCOundrels made their plea With GPL, our software all is free But the buyout that they got was in a court of bankruptcy Sailing through the legal straits of High Barratry
And oh, it was a sorry thing to hear them rant and roar With GPL, our software all is free With their options underwater as their stock sank through the floor Sailing through the legal straits of High Barratry
Though they started as Caldera selling Linux long ago With GPL, our software all is free Soon a huge volcanic crater will be all that's left of SCO Sailing through the legal straits of High Barratry
This is a wonderful book. I have the 1970-something second edition. Pocket mini-bios of just about everyone loosely describable as having anything to do with science, from the dawn of history until the book was written. Fascinating stuff. (Like, why Giordano Bruno was really burned at the stake. Had next to nothing to do with that Earth going around the sun stuff.)
I don't think any bright 5th-grader would have any trouble reading it. I haven't seen the 1980 version.
They even did something Roddenberry hinted at in the cartoon -- the Federation was *not* started by humans; humans joined a Federation (called the Commonwealth in Andromeda) which was founded sometime turing Earth's last Ice Age. If you watch the cartoon Trek episode "Jihad", note how Kirk, etc., relate to that cat-like alien who's one of the Federation's original founders. Similar to how the Andromeda crew react when a Vedran puts in an appearance.
Yeah, yeah, yeah... Andromeda, the series, in spite of a really nifty background, was wildly uneven. For every really good episode, there was at least one unspeakably putrid episode. And that was the first year -- Jerkules and the suits soon fired everyone with a brain and destroyed everything good about the series, and "unspeakably putrid" became top end of the Bell curve. I didn't watch any of the fourth and final season, but all accounts are it got even worse. Worse than the third season, it'd have to be getting into "brains running out your ears, spork your eyes out just to make it stop" territory.
Alas. It did start off with a good idea and an interesting setting.
They've got those in the Southeastern US, too. I grew up in the Florida Panhandle, and the 4" long flying kind were the standard cockroach, also in Alabama and Houston. I didn't know about the smaller, wingless, kind until I moved to California.
Student has a class assignment in FORTRAN, has the whole program punched up on cards, but when he runs the deck, he gets a nice compile listing, no diagnostics, except at the end, it says "NO PROGRAM", and exits.
He takes his deck and listing to Use{r|less} Services, where the usual suspects mull over his listing for half the day trying to figure out what in the world was going on. They see obvious CS101 novice type syntax errors which should have provoked nastygrams from the compiler, but the compiler just happily chugged through them with no diagnostic.
Someone notices that the addresses in the right hand column are all zero. No code is being generated. (This compiler, in its output listing, printed the address of the generated code for each line as a debugging aid. Obviously, it's not doing any optimization.)
Finally, they give up and hand it to the resident person who really knew this stuff. He looked at the listing, said "Hand me the deck." They did, he looked at it, punched a card to read it into a file, did a quick text edit on the file, punched the file, and threw the original away.
When the deck he punched ran, there was the same listing, but with all the diagnostics for the syntax errors.
The first line of the FORTRAN program was a comment.
The user had started all the lines of his program in column 6, rather than column 7, making them all continuations of the leading comment.
Heh.... A Chinese friend says that's the reason, in Chinese mythology about this stuff, that each generation of flying kung-fu masters had diminished powers. Each teacher would hold something back, then when their students became teachers, they would hold something back... eventually, all the really good stuff was lost.
Even if what they discovered (and the jury is still out on that) is some kind of magic radiation free D-D-fusion, it still doesn't work.
The whole contraption operates at atmospheric pressure, so what you get is at best steam at 100 deg. C or 370K. Converting this to electricity in a perfect (but unobtainable) Carnot machine with a heat sink at 300K gives an efficiency of a measly 20%.
Well, assuming (which I doubt) that all they can do is heat water, there are a whole lot of industrial uses for heated water for "process heat", or for home water heaters, or just plain home heating, for that matter.
If they can build some alamagoosa which takes cold water in, and puts hot water out, that puts out a lot more than 3.4 BTU per watt-hour of input power, then who cares how it happens?
(Well, the aliens whose broadcast-power network they're tapping, they might care. A lot.:-)
The problem is, I've heard all this before. In January of 1996, someone by the name of Patterson had a hot water heater that supposedly worked on this principle, little resin beads plated with layers of nickle and palladium. There was an item on the ABC news magazine program. (20-20?) They were supposedly going to have home hot water heaters on the market "Real Soon Now."
A lot of Florida is "conservative Democrat". In all local and county offices, the Democrat is going to win. Period. This is less so for state-wide offices, where liberal Democrats are the party's candidate, and much less so in voting for President.
If you want your vote to count towards local offices, you have to be registered Democrat. The election that counts is the Democrat primary.
Case in point, my parents. They are registered Democrats. Always have been. They definitely did not vote for Kerry, and probably not any other Democrat presidential candidate since Truman.
Any so-called "analysis" which fails to take this factor into consideration is completely worthless.
I guess my biggest gripe with the Ewoks in RotJ was that this was supposed to have been Chewbacca's home planet; they were supposed to have been wookies. Lucas's lame explanation of why he switched (that he wanted "noble savage" primitives to beat the storm troopers, and Chewbacca's demonstrated use of technology in the previous movies had, in his mind, contaminated all Wookiedom for all time) was what really annoyed me about the Ewoks.
(In RotJ, at least. The Ewok TV movies were much much worse, but I don't know how much Lucas actually had to do with them. He's certainly disowned the unspeakably rancid "Star Wars Christmas Special", which as far as I know, he may have had nothing to do with at all.)
I actually kind of agree with you about Jar-Jar. I just threw him in because "everybody hates Jar-Jar." He did have one line which, along with a line by Amidala, hinted at something of non-Jedi attitudes about the Jedi which proably should have been explored more. (Amidala's crack about "legendary Jedi recklessness", and Jar-Jar saying their piloting was insane and was going to get them all killed.)
(I'd still love to have one of those Ewok T-shirts that some of the Lucasfilm people were wearing at cons after RotJ: Ewoks with knives, guns, Ewok in glider clutching a large bomb, chief Ewok holding a machine gun, cartridge belts across his chest, knife clenched in his teeth, saying "Damn right we're cute!")
"I just hope that he [George] doesn't just do the TV series for the money that it will make and end up giving us a weekly kiddie show, he needs to learn from the mistakes from Star Trek and give sci-fi fans a quality show,"
George needs to learn from the mistakes of the Ewoks in "Return of the Jedi", the two Ewok made-for-TV movies, Jar-Jar Binks, the Star Wars Christmas Special...
... Howard the Duck...
I have a really, exceptionally, horribly bad feeling about this, as if a billion brain cells cried out in horror, and were suddenly silenced.
Last I heard of OLED displays, they were definitely there with the red cells. The green cells were a problem - they lasted long enough that they could go to market with it, but their lifetime was short enough that there'd likely be lots of complaints.
The blue ones, however, had such a short lifetime that they (at that time) definitely were not ready for prime time.
I wonder what the expected lifetime of the blue cells in these displays is?
Jerry Pournelle on his web page http://jerrypournelle.com/ has described himself as an "old cold warrior" and a "paleoconservative." (As opposed to "neoconservatives", which he has a few sharp things to say about...)
As for social conservatives, though politically he seems more liberal, Orson Scott Card has generated quite a few flame wars on Usenet for some of his articles in the Mormon press.
Slashdot Mirror
This story was published in 1968.
One quibble:
Actually, the whole idea of the scramjet is that you don't boost the air up to the speed the engine is currently going. You burn the fuel in the air as it passes through the engine at supersonic speed. That's the "SC" in Supersonic Combustion Ramjet.
There are, of course, lots of practical difficulties; you listed some of them.
It doesn't?
Gee, that's not what all the Anthropogenic Global Warming alarmists were saying in 2005. They were all shrieking "SEE! SEE!!! It's all George Bush's fault for not signing Kyoto!!!"
Every time there's a heat wave, the cries are "There it is!! *PROOF*!!!!"
When it's followed by a cold snap, it's "um, mumble mumble mumble".
The rule seems to be that any single year which fits the agenda is "Obviously A Trend." Any single year which fails to fit the agenda is "Well, a single year does not make a trend."
Though there's also the experience of a guy I knew in college in Alabama back in the late 70s -- An African-American man with a white wife, working as a systems administrator in the campus computer center. He moved to a "oh-so-very-superior-pat-ourselves-on-the-back-for -being-so-very-tolerant-and-progressive" part of the country.
He moved back to Alabama.
He said that the percentage of racists and bigots was no less in the self-proclaimed "progressive" parts of the country. The racists and bigots there, though, would smile to your face and shake your hand, then knife you in the back when you least expected it. He said in Alabama, where the same percentage of bigots were up-front about it, they could be avoided. The majority who were friendly and shook your hand were being honest.
This whole process seems unnecessarily complex to me. React aluminum with water to get hydrogen to run in a IC engine or fuel cell? If you're going to run the hydrogen in a fuel cell, what does this process do that makes it better than an aluminum-air battery? That seems to be a simpler and more direct use of the energy you get from oxidizing aluminum. I would think it would be more energy efficient.
We need judges with the gumption to say "Contempt of court for bringing such an egregiously frivolous case! Ninety days in jail! And double that for your slimy no-good excuse for a lawyer!"
That said, by "years to recoup investment in a hybrid" standards, current hybrids aren't a good investment. But I'd like to see them do well, because once a market in hybrids and pure electric vehicles is established, it's very likely to lead to vehicles which do make direct economic sense.
Unless you're a Scientologist.
This is the very ultra special tax break that Scientology members get - Fees for auditing, to the tune of (last I heard) $700/hour or so, are fully and completely tax deductible, in spite of a Supreme Court ruling that they were not. The IRS overruled the Supreme Court and said Scientology auditing fees were fully deductible in 1993.
Now, you may well ask, how come the IRS has the authority to overrule the Supreme Court? That is an extremely good question that I would really, really love to see answered.
Dang... You beat me to it. (I'm sure glad I searched for "disturbance in the force" before I posted mine.)
This didn't make me lose faith in scientists or science. It would have made me lose faith in "science" "journalists", except for one factor -- I have zero faith in what passes for "science" "journalists" already, based on their apparent complete ignorance of science as shown by the unbelievable nonsense they report. This latest was just ... same bozos, more crap.
Reprocess, separate out the fission products, and put the remaining U238, U235, plutonium, and other actinides into new fuel rods, and available fuel expands by several times. This is before you even start thinking about breeder reactors.
> Western Civilization ... needs to take a break from bashing Christianity and recognize where the real danger lies.
But bashing Christianity is safe. You don't have to go into hiding.
You don't see many episodes of PETA throwing red paint on Hells Angels' leathers. Much safer to attack some elderly society matron. Same principle. (Or lack thereof.)
That's the thing that bugs me about this whole debate -- The constant drumbeat that THERE IS NO DISSENT -- THERE IS NO DISSENT -- THERE IS NO DISSENT -- then, when someone points out that there *is* dissent, they either stop up their ears, jump up and down and keep chanting THERE IS NO DISSENT -- THERE IS NO DISSENT -- THERE IS NO DISSENT -- or, as in this current discussion, they say "They are just saying this because they have been coopted by the EEEEEEVILE OIL COMPANIES WHO WANT TO DESTROY THE WORLD!!! (As if oil company executives didn't live on this planet, too. Many of them in low-lying cities like Houston.) Pretending that dissent from The Received Dogma does not exist, when it manifestly does, is not science. There is dissent from the "imminent disaster" dogma. Yes, there is some warming, yes, human activity probably has something to do with some part of it, but other human activities are probably resulting in some cooling. And all the warming is not due to human activity - Mars is warming, Europa is warming. Obviously those are not due to human activity. And to say that the Union of Concerned Scientists, authors of this little "expose'", doesn't have their own agenda is ... silly, at best.
Looks like the last line of Steve Savitsky's song will soon come true:
(Posting rather than linking so Steve's web site doesn't get slashdotted, and the "Creative Commons License" permits it.)
High Barratry
Lyrics © 2004 Stephen Savitzky.
Creative Commons License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ Some rights reserved.
To the tune of: High Barbary (trad)
Of a company called S-C-O, the tale I'll briefly tell
With G-P-L, our software all is free
Who turned their hands to barratry when software wouldn't sell
Sailing through the legal straits of High Barratry
``And are you selling Linux or old Unixware?'' said we
With GPL, our software all is free
We're the owners of all Unix come demanding of our fee!
Sailing through the legal straits of High Barratry
You've stolen code from System V and given it away
With GPL, our software all is free
So buy licences for Linux, or we'll sue and make you pay
Sailing through the legal straits of High Barratry
They first sued IBM over a million lines of code
With GPL, our software all is free
Though a subroutine or two from BSD was all they showed
Sailing through the legal straits of High Barratry
Well, RedHat sued them next so they went gunning for Novell
With GPL, our software all is free
Autozone and Daimler-Chrysler soon were on their list as well
Sailing through the legal straits of High Barratry
Then lawsuit and lawsuit we fought for many a day
With GPL, our software all is free
'Till the research done at Groklaw blew their cases clean away
Sailing through the legal straits of High Barratry
Oh, please buy us out, the SCOundrels made their plea
With GPL, our software all is free
But the buyout that they got was in a court of bankruptcy
Sailing through the legal straits of High Barratry
And oh, it was a sorry thing to hear them rant and roar
With GPL, our software all is free
With their options underwater as their stock sank through the floor
Sailing through the legal straits of High Barratry
Though they started as Caldera selling Linux long ago
With GPL, our software all is free
Soon a huge volcanic crater will be all that's left of SCO
Sailing through the legal straits of High Barratry
This is a wonderful book. I have the 1970-something second edition. Pocket mini-bios of just about everyone loosely describable as having anything to do with science, from the dawn of history until the book was written. Fascinating stuff. (Like, why Giordano Bruno was really burned at the stake. Had next to nothing to do with that Earth going around the sun stuff.)
I don't think any bright 5th-grader would have any trouble reading it. I haven't seen the 1980 version.
They even did something Roddenberry hinted at in the cartoon -- the Federation was *not* started by humans; humans joined a Federation (called the Commonwealth in Andromeda) which was founded sometime turing Earth's last Ice Age. If you watch the cartoon Trek episode "Jihad", note how Kirk, etc., relate to that cat-like alien who's one of the Federation's original founders. Similar to how the Andromeda crew react when a Vedran puts in an appearance.
Yeah, yeah, yeah... Andromeda, the series, in spite of a really nifty background, was wildly uneven. For every really good episode, there was at least one unspeakably putrid episode. And that was the first year -- Jerkules and the suits soon fired everyone with a brain and destroyed everything good about the series, and "unspeakably putrid" became top end of the Bell curve. I didn't watch any of the fourth and final season, but all accounts are it got even worse. Worse than the third season, it'd have to be getting into "brains running out your ears, spork your eyes out just to make it stop" territory.
Alas. It did start off with a good idea and an interesting setting.
They've got those in the Southeastern US, too. I grew up in the Florida Panhandle, and the 4" long flying kind were the standard cockroach, also in Alabama and Houston. I didn't know about the smaller, wingless, kind until I moved to California.
One of my favorites is from ... a long time ago.
Student has a class assignment in FORTRAN, has the whole program punched up on cards, but when he runs the deck, he gets a nice compile listing, no diagnostics, except at the end, it says "NO PROGRAM", and exits.
He takes his deck and listing to Use{r|less} Services, where the usual suspects mull over his listing for half the day trying to figure out what in the world was going on. They see obvious CS101 novice type syntax errors which should have provoked nastygrams from the compiler, but the compiler just happily chugged through them with no diagnostic.
Someone notices that the addresses in the right hand column are all zero. No code is being generated. (This compiler, in its output listing, printed the address of the generated code for each line as a debugging aid. Obviously, it's not doing any optimization.)
Finally, they give up and hand it to the resident person who really knew this stuff. He looked at the listing, said "Hand me the deck." They did, he looked at it, punched a card to read it into a file, did a quick text edit on the file, punched the file, and threw the original away.
When the deck he punched ran, there was the same listing, but with all the diagnostics for the syntax errors.
The first line of the FORTRAN program was a comment.
The user had started all the lines of his program in column 6, rather than column 7, making them all continuations of the leading comment.
> always be able to kill your students...
Heh.... A Chinese friend says that's the reason, in Chinese mythology about this stuff, that each generation of flying kung-fu masters had diminished powers. Each teacher would hold something back, then when their students became teachers, they would hold something back... eventually, all the really good stuff was lost.
Well, assuming (which I doubt) that all they can do is heat water, there are a whole lot of industrial uses for heated water for "process heat", or for home water heaters, or just plain home heating, for that matter.
If they can build some alamagoosa which takes cold water in, and puts hot water out, that puts out a lot more than 3.4 BTU per watt-hour of input power, then who cares how it happens?
(Well, the aliens whose broadcast-power network they're tapping, they might care. A lot.
The problem is, I've heard all this before. In January of 1996, someone by the name of Patterson had a hot water heater that supposedly worked on this principle, little resin beads plated with layers of nickle and palladium. There was an item on the ABC news magazine program. (20-20?) They were supposedly going to have home hot water heaters on the market "Real Soon Now."
Obviously, it didn't happen.
I expect it to "not happen" this time, too.
But I'd love to be surprised.
A lot of Florida is "conservative Democrat". In all local and county offices, the Democrat is going to win. Period. This is less so for state-wide offices, where liberal Democrats are the party's candidate, and much less so in voting for President.
If you want your vote to count towards local offices, you have to be registered Democrat. The election that counts is the Democrat primary.
Case in point, my parents. They are registered Democrats. Always have been. They definitely did not vote for Kerry, and probably not any other Democrat presidential candidate since Truman.
Any so-called "analysis" which fails to take this factor into consideration is completely worthless.
I guess my biggest gripe with the Ewoks in RotJ was that this was supposed to have been Chewbacca's home planet; they were supposed to have been wookies. Lucas's lame explanation of why he switched (that he wanted "noble savage" primitives to beat the storm troopers, and Chewbacca's demonstrated use of technology in the previous movies had, in his mind, contaminated all Wookiedom for all time) was what really annoyed me about the Ewoks.
(In RotJ, at least. The Ewok TV movies were much much worse, but I don't know how much Lucas actually had to do with them. He's certainly disowned the unspeakably rancid "Star Wars Christmas Special", which as far as I know, he may have had nothing to do with at all.)
I actually kind of agree with you about Jar-Jar. I just threw him in because "everybody hates Jar-Jar." He did have one line which, along with a line by Amidala, hinted at something of non-Jedi attitudes about the Jedi which proably should have been explored more. (Amidala's crack about "legendary Jedi recklessness", and Jar-Jar saying their piloting was insane and was going to get them all killed.)
(I'd still love to have one of those Ewok T-shirts that some of the Lucasfilm people were wearing at cons after RotJ: Ewoks with knives, guns, Ewok in glider clutching a large bomb, chief Ewok holding a machine gun, cartridge belts across his chest, knife clenched in his teeth, saying "Damn right we're cute!")
"I just hope that he [George] doesn't just do the TV series for the money that it will make and end up giving us a weekly kiddie show, he needs to learn from the mistakes from Star Trek and give sci-fi fans a quality show,"
... Howard the Duck ...
George needs to learn from the mistakes of the Ewoks in "Return of the Jedi", the two Ewok made-for-TV movies, Jar-Jar Binks, the Star Wars Christmas Special...
I have a really, exceptionally, horribly bad feeling about this, as if a billion brain cells cried out in horror, and were suddenly silenced.
Last I heard of OLED displays, they were definitely there with the red cells. The green cells were a problem - they lasted long enough that they could go to market with it, but their lifetime was short enough that there'd likely be lots of complaints.
The blue ones, however, had such a short lifetime that they (at that time) definitely were not ready for prime time.
I wonder what the expected lifetime of the blue cells in these displays is?
Jerry Pournelle on his web page http://jerrypournelle.com/ has described himself as an "old cold warrior" and a "paleoconservative." (As opposed to "neoconservatives", which he has a few sharp things to say about...)
As for social conservatives, though politically he seems more liberal, Orson Scott Card has generated quite a few flame wars on Usenet for some of his articles in the Mormon press.