You'd be even better off to launch a pile of fighters armed with missiles and cannons. The Star Trek idea of starships fighting each other without fighter support is nuts.
Yes, but even then you'd be a lot easier off to just use missiles. No crew needed to do that, and no advanced fighters needed either. Don't forget (at least if you're trying to be realistic) is that to pack any decent punch into a package as small as a fighter and keep it maneuverable and protected is far beyond their technology range, but then again when did ST ever pay attention to logic?
In either case although a compliment of a few fighters/scouts is most likely mandatory, I think that the primary weapons would be nuke pumped missiles.
Not if you've got cannons on fast turrets. We've got those now on our ships.
I don't think that bullets are going to do the trick. Don't forget that we're talking about humungous laser/phaser/whatever cannons here, which will not only be huge but also not maneuverable. Add the fact that on earth your targets are moving at 500mi/h, in space they're moving at 50000mi/h and even a sensitive targeting turret will have a hard time to keep up with them.
And finally add in the feasability that most combat will be computer driven and there's no point for manned interceptors anyways. People's reaction times will be FAR too slow for this type of combat, so this kinda excludes the use of a manned interceptor. Also the G-Forces would be wildly unbearable.
But in any case, it's far easier to make a simple small missile that's just a nuke-fed laser cannon that doesn't require life support or large amounts of feul or crew capabilities or anything, just a small tiny package that can move like a bat out of hell and toast your opponent.
This is the same logic that caused the F4 Phantom to be initially built without close-range weapons. All it takes is one flight of highly maneuverable enemy craft to screw that theory.
Dude, we're talking about apples and oranges here. There's a large difference between being able to fly at 500mi/h and 50000mi/h, plus space is so much bigger and it's really easy to run away. But yes, you will need to have point defence weapons, yes, but they will be used for just that, defence. Not as a primary offensive weapon.
Why not. It's called leading your target. World War II naval battles were fought at several weapon-second distances all the time. And they weren't using guided missiles
You're missing the entire point here. Several light second distances means that by the time that you get the positional information and fire your cannon your opponent has 6 seconds to change their position. Plus over a distance of 1,000,000km away with a beam, firing at a target with a cross-section of, let's say, 1 square km (of course, they'd have his thin side towards you anyways), you're looking at firing a conventional laser and hoping to hit another bullet in midair from 8 miles away, except the bullet doesn't move predictably. The precision that you'd need is down to 1x10^-12th of a degree (that's 0.000000000001 degrees) of accuracy needed to hit your target. With that kind of accuracy needed, even a subtle inertia change on the target's part will throw your calculations off. Not only that, but it's highly unlikely that your gun itself can consistantly fire with that kind of accuracy, never mind having your targeting system be able to handle that, and add a 6 second latency and it will be (for all intensive purposes) impossible to hit.
You can't compare space battle to naval/aero combat that we've seen around WWII. Even nowadays you fire your missiles at your target that's far out of visual range and either your missiles miss, they hit, your ecm works, or you die.
look at the really old engines and compare it to a modern car engine.
Hell, I have a '68 Plymouth Valiant with 45,000mi on it, open the hood and I can climb in while the engine's running. There's literally a battery, the engine, the radiator, a few reservoirs and that's it.
Even on my '85 Camaro I've taken that engine apart and it's not that complicated.
I say not that complicated by concept, but implementation requires many many many details.
However I'd assume that if Cochran had the $$$ to do it then it obviously can't cost much, and if that's the case then NASA would have beaten them to the punch. Plus is warp drive technology was around (in order to be around it must have been tested first, right? which of course implies some ground with a LOT of money), even if NASA didn't pick it up, there'd be a lot of other private interests that would have.
And there's something fundamentally different than using century old rocket technology (well, almost) and using something that apparently hasn't even been tested yet, much less having it work.
And next stupid question, take a look at the design of his vessel. How the hell did he get back to earth? Did he save any of the prototype?
There's no reason to expect that spaceship fights would turn out any different.
There's a huge difference. The mass ratio between a missile and your plane is on the order of what, 1/100? On a spaceship you'll easily be 1000x that ratio. Moving a 3 ton missile vs a 300,000 ton spaceship is going to be a LOT easier to do, especially if you don't have scifi tech (or the ability to ignore physics) like inertial dampeners or omnidirectional phasers. But even in sci-fi you'd be much better off to launch a pile of missiles that can maneuver and travel 10x faster than you can to get there, and it's much more difficult to shoot them down. Plus you _can_ launch them from several light-second distances, which makes dogfights impossible anyways, even if you had omnidirectional lasers. Additionally space is much much bigger than what you can get in the air here, with no obligation to get close to your enemy.
And if you don't have scifi abilities, then you're most likely going to be stuck with a laser (or something) cannon, which won't be omnidirectional, thus requiring you to either move your ship or the laser around, which won't be fast. Plus at several light second distances, you won't be able to target your enemies anyways.
Modern day aircraft fights are
a) sensors/radar detect enemy fighters on approach
b) fighters scrambled
c) fighters lock on and fire missiles far out of range of sight (5+km away)
d) either your ECM works and you're ok, your missiles hit them and you win, or their missiles get you and you're dead. Either way the other party goes home, or mops up the mess.
Actually no ship should have lasers, or any other beam weapon for that matter. At least not as their primary kick'n'ass weapon.
They'd be pointless.
Any battle will most likely be faught at several light-second distances, and missiles with laser cannons would be far more likely a choice. Send out missiles with a nuke that channels all of it's power into a laser and blasts the enemy ship rather than risk having your ship hit. That and you should have a lot more manned/automatic fighters, as the main ship can't protect itself, especially without shields. IT'd get pulverized in no time.
I'm sorry, but I thought that the whole idea of Cochran from the start was LAME^2000. Even giving them all the allowances that I could, the idea that some drunken loony converts an old missile into a warp vessel, and does this BEFORE any governmently funded operation did, that's FAR FAR FAR beyond any sort of credibility. And you'd assume that there was some sort of proof that a warp drive would work prior to him developing it, thus the governments would have poured a LOT of money into their space programs to develop this thing. And considering how even with 100s of professionals and weeks of checks on the launchpad we still have things go wrong, I find it VERY hard to even imagine that some drunk guy could do it. And to top it all off, the launch into space was far far far too unrealistic. You're being pushed back into your chair with many G's of force, you can't just lesurely move your hand out and flick some switches in chairs that look like they were ripped out of some old office. Actually I hated the entire plot of "First Contact", but watching troy get drunk was very funny. Aaahhhh
Wow you tore a strip off it. Before I try to refute everything, is there any SF shows that you like? You do have to give them some leeway you know, and it is just a pilot.
Did anyone else notice the whole "Neptune and back in 6 minutes" thing? I worked it out, that's 87 times the speed of light. Not very fast if you plan on going anywhere outside of the nearest couple dozen star systems in any reasonable (few days) period of time.
I respect your comments, but I would like to advocate for the devil anyways =)
No universal translators-Hooray, a realistic look at meeting strangers...they're strange!
Don't know if this is a good idea, as you can't expect all aliens to speak the same language, much less fluently. I thought that the univ translator was a good idea, especially for contact with species that you've never met before/etc. And on what basis do we have to judge what "realistic aliens" would look like? They might look exactly like us, or like rocks, so as long as you can somehow differenciate them I think that's "realistic" enough for me.
There is potential for some ongoing plot lines, like the best of DS9.
Yeah, but I wonder how well they will be explored. That's one of the problems of having multiple writers is that you don't get very complicated or deep story arcs. I loved B5 for that, since every show was either written directly by or given to someone else who was told what to do by JMS. That allowed for some things that came up in first season to resurface again in the 3rd season, I loved that. I haven't seen anything remotely close to that in ST to date, and I hope that they really improve that, but I'm quite doubtful.
I didn't like the vulcan. She wasn't even hot enough to fill the 7/9 spot.
I'm somehow glad of that. 7of9 was FAR FAR FAR too "outplaced" for that show. She didn't belong there, muchless in that outfit all the time. SF isn't about having babes with huge breasts and minimal acting skill. I'd rather have more moderately good looking people. I think that Kira/Dax filled those roles well, and Kez (?) from DS9 (didn't watch it much, Neelix's girl) was good for that role too.
There wasn't a lot of character development
How much do you expect in the first 42 minute show? =) I loved B5 again for that, all of 1st season was pure character development and setting up all of the arcs that were going to happen in the story. I think that getting to know your characters is a VERY good thing, but again I fear about how well this will be done due to the multitude of authors thing. Or will there be only a couple authors? I'm not really sure on that whole count.
In any case, I guess they could change "where no man has gone before" to "where no man or woman or tentically thing of the 76a gender or the not quite so tentically thing of the 398s gender or the non-gendered blobs of planet Gorprim or..."
er, what's wrong with the "where no one has gone before"? Seems pretty slick to me.
Is a gender neutral language to be the end goal of reaching 50 years into the future?....REALLY?...
Er, isn't that 150 years? But in either case, mankind doesn't "decide" to make a gender neutral language. All it takes is for one person to coin a phrase and for people to use it to get around the him/her/their issue and the he/she/?it?/they issue, etc. Even today there are acceptable alternatives to most gender problems. And the term "guy" could have just become commonly accepted as gender inspecific (as it is mostly today), or even "man" could have become gender inspecific because everyone calls then "males" now. Just because a word means something today doesn't mean that it will mean the same thing 10 years from now, nevermind 50. Epistemology is really interesting.
And I have learned, because it is impossible to do otherwise, that you must give all SF shows a certain amount of slack.
For example, you must ignore the language issues to the most part. Yes, you will hear everything in english. Doesn't mean that they're speaking english, but we'll all hear it in that. And when interspecies communications takes effect with species that they just met for the first time, well, just let that one slide. It's cool if they attempt to compensate for this, but it's not a big deal.
Secondly, take things in stride on a consistancy point of view. That is to say that if they're consistantly inconsistent (to current life) in predictable ways, then get used to it. Don't complain because of the "woah captain, the [insert tech here] just ruptured and the [insert tech here] just [insert tech here]'ed" when it doesn't make a lot of sense or contradicts what happened 5 episodes before in the show. However where you can complain is when they contradict themselves in largly obvious ways. But if the show has defined that a "heisenburg compensator" will allow you to determine both the position and velocity of a particle at the same time, fine, as long as they keep it consistant inside the show.
Thirdly try to ignore things that can't really be helped without a great expense. If they're on Mars and gravity/the moon/some other planet looks about the same (obviously because it will be filmed the same!), go with it. If they say that one planet has a more orangish sun than yellow, but you see a yellow one in a later show, don't complain. However what you can complain about is things that could have easily been avoided. For example, on B5:Crusade there's one thing that stuck out in my mind like a sore thumb. There's a show where Gideon is in an encounter suit walking through a deck that has been depressurized, and not only is there papers all over the place, but as he walks by one it moves as if blown! If there's no air, you can't do that...
And finally give shows at least a few episodes to get their feet on the ground. Almost all shows kinda suck for a while and take some getting used to, epsecially if you're picky. I got tired of turning off my brain to watch SF so I just learned to change my perspective instead =) You don't need to be picky and displeased about everything, it's your choice (the generic pleural you that is).
what the hell did you call good ole Seven-Of-Nine then? Like that wasn't her whole purpose for being on the show... Or Dax&Kira (to a lesser extent), or Troy, or just about every woman on TOS with those super-mini skirts. yeaow.
here's the dumb question. Apparently the webhost got spooked when they looked at the logs to see that there was a file downloaded, or did the sysadmin just freak and call the cops anyways?
I.e. if there was reason to believe that this guy had downloaded files or otherwise stolen IP, then I can agree with the search being performed, however if there was no reason to believe this, I think that the cops were being too aggressive to search & cease his property without reason to believe that he had stolen anything.
However if there was logging that he had downloaded stuff, then why the hell didn't he erase the logs? If you have that level of access to something, why wouldn't you erase all your tracks? Seems a little daft to me...
I'd wager a guess that 99% of car trips in North America are less than 45 minutes. Probably 2/3rds are less than 30 minutes.
I have a CD player in my car, and a small binder with 10 cds in it. I find it a trivial task to change the CD, and I tend to only do that when I get in the car and turn it on. Even when driving it's not a difficult thing to do. Plus for those with decks, you don't even need to do that much.
If you use only real CDs (meaning commercial music) and not your own custom CDs, then I think that this might be useful. However by the very nature of this you're doing everything on MP3s and now that burners and disks are so cheap it's not worth the large cost of the device. I can easily understand why there was far insufficient demand to continue production of the device.
I also make trips about twice a month that are about an hour in length, and I never listen to the radio. I change the CD once or twice sometimes, and as I said, it's a trivial task.
Or just do what the rest of the world did, buy a $120-$160 decent CD player and just burn normal CDs/CDRWs.
I'm rarely in my car for > 30mins at a time, and with CDs being like $0.30 and drive speeds burning at 16x-24x (i.e. a few minutes), I'd just make a playlist, burn it while getting ready, and grab it 5 minutes later on the way out. I've got about 15 of these that have all of the music that I commonly listen to, and I rarely need to change CDs while driving.
I know that in my proceedings to backup some of my DVDs, I found that a few of them were very difficult to rip properly. They'd all get errors in the decrypted vob files or just be unable to find the "key", but yet my settop DVD player could play them fine. Thoughts?
The reason why they use gold plating is because it doesn't rust or tarnish. Copper and silver do, thus degrading the connections over time. (as you mentioned)
You could use a wire from a twisted pair if you want, but where the quality comes in is: (a) defeating or blocking interferance and (b) the connections between the wires. If you have a shitty connection, you'll also get some signal reflection which will give undesired results. So those $100 cables at Circuit City have most likely been tested to the nines and are, in fact, better than most $15 cables, provided that you live in an extremely noisy environment and have a $5000 stereo system. But for most people who have a 100ft lengths was pretty easy (not to mention inexpensive too). I did, however, have to make a ground noise inhibitor on the TV side (fscking cable co's), but after that all was good.
Re:And to think we had an astronaut named Buzz!
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Beer In Space
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When the Mir crew ran out of alcohol reserves, they would often go on "treasure-seeking" expeditions for more, tearing down interior panels to find bottles hidden by previous crews, said Alexander Poleshchuk, who spent six months on board Mir in 1993.
Ok, I wasn't sure and never tried, I must admit. I figured that you had to have a legal copy, and it'd phone the FBI on you if they found you were using a pirated copy, so I never tried =)
Does anyone know about any programs like CNET's AutoUpdate program? That is pretty cool, it monitors all apps that you have installed on your system and informs you when there's updates. Besides from letting them know everything you're running, it's really nifty, and I think it does windows as well. That'd be cool.
I know that XP has a built in autoupdater that's much more aggressive at reminding you to update your system.
People that know where to find product keys/cracks/warez/illegal software/etc are much more likely to be concerned about the security of their computers and will apply the most patches. At least in my version of reality...
I would hazard a guess that you're thinking is a little tainted.
Don't forget that a lot of piracy is either (a) casual piracy, friend-to-friend or (b) corporate piracy. In both of those 2 cases they are unlikely to be savvy enough to think much about that. I have also many friends who are using... er, testing MS products that don't think about that either.
To be honest, I have never tried windows update because I figured that it needed a legit copy, but I guess that it would be more in MS's best interests if you didn't need that. Does it work without a legit copy? I just always went to the MS site directly.
IIS is an application server.
Apache is a web server.
Big difference.
Apache can get plugins to make it a web server, now, yes. Ok. =)
And please, people, read my post before arguing it (not just you).
Telek> unfortunately in this case longer means a more convoluted codebase
jallen02> And just because a project has been around longer also does not mean a convolouted codebase
As in, in this case the code (might) be a lot more convoluted, with a heavier API, due (in part) to it's age. Maybe. In this case.
Most of these exploits are occuring in rather small modules, which would obviously have a much smaller amount of code than the main IIS
(sigh). You got me there. Open source does have it's benefits (other than being open and free of course) =)
I just don't buy the argument the code is more confusing on a basis of age only
I never said only. And I'm just extrapolating from looking at the APIs, which are rather large. I really have no idea about the codebase, other than rumours that I have heard.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd be even better off to launch a pile of fighters armed with missiles and cannons. The Star Trek idea of starships fighting each other without fighter support is nuts.
Yes, but even then you'd be a lot easier off to just use missiles. No crew needed to do that, and no advanced fighters needed either. Don't forget (at least if you're trying to be realistic) is that to pack any decent punch into a package as small as a fighter and keep it maneuverable and protected is far beyond their technology range, but then again when did ST ever pay attention to logic?
In either case although a compliment of a few fighters/scouts is most likely mandatory, I think that the primary weapons would be nuke pumped missiles.
Not if you've got cannons on fast turrets. We've got those now on our ships.
I don't think that bullets are going to do the trick. Don't forget that we're talking about humungous laser/phaser/whatever cannons here, which will not only be huge but also not maneuverable. Add the fact that on earth your targets are moving at 500mi/h, in space they're moving at 50000mi/h and even a sensitive targeting turret will have a hard time to keep up with them.
And finally add in the feasability that most combat will be computer driven and there's no point for manned interceptors anyways. People's reaction times will be FAR too slow for this type of combat, so this kinda excludes the use of a manned interceptor. Also the G-Forces would be wildly unbearable.
But in any case, it's far easier to make a simple small missile that's just a nuke-fed laser cannon that doesn't require life support or large amounts of feul or crew capabilities or anything, just a small tiny package that can move like a bat out of hell and toast your opponent.
This is the same logic that caused the F4 Phantom to be initially built without close-range weapons. All it takes is one flight of highly maneuverable enemy craft to screw that theory.
Dude, we're talking about apples and oranges here. There's a large difference between being able to fly at 500mi/h and 50000mi/h, plus space is so much bigger and it's really easy to run away. But yes, you will need to have point defence weapons, yes, but they will be used for just that, defence. Not as a primary offensive weapon.
Why not. It's called leading your target. World War II naval battles were fought at several weapon-second distances all the time. And they weren't using guided missiles
You're missing the entire point here. Several light second distances means that by the time that you get the positional information and fire your cannon your opponent has 6 seconds to change their position. Plus over a distance of 1,000,000km away with a beam, firing at a target with a cross-section of, let's say, 1 square km (of course, they'd have his thin side towards you anyways), you're looking at firing a conventional laser and hoping to hit another bullet in midair from 8 miles away, except the bullet doesn't move predictably. The precision that you'd need is down to 1x10^-12th of a degree (that's 0.000000000001 degrees) of accuracy needed to hit your target. With that kind of accuracy needed, even a subtle inertia change on the target's part will throw your calculations off. Not only that, but it's highly unlikely that your gun itself can consistantly fire with that kind of accuracy, never mind having your targeting system be able to handle that, and add a 6 second latency and it will be (for all intensive purposes) impossible to hit.
You can't compare space battle to naval/aero combat that we've seen around WWII. Even nowadays you fire your missiles at your target that's far out of visual range and either your missiles miss, they hit, your ecm works, or you die.
look at the really old engines and compare it to a modern car engine.
Hell, I have a '68 Plymouth Valiant with 45,000mi on it, open the hood and I can climb in while the engine's running. There's literally a battery, the engine, the radiator, a few reservoirs and that's it.
Even on my '85 Camaro I've taken that engine apart and it's not that complicated.
I say not that complicated by concept, but implementation requires many many many details.
However I'd assume that if Cochran had the $$$ to do it then it obviously can't cost much, and if that's the case then NASA would have beaten them to the punch. Plus is warp drive technology was around (in order to be around it must have been tested first, right? which of course implies some ground with a LOT of money), even if NASA didn't pick it up, there'd be a lot of other private interests that would have.
And there's something fundamentally different than using century old rocket technology (well, almost) and using something that apparently hasn't even been tested yet, much less having it work.
And next stupid question, take a look at the design of his vessel. How the hell did he get back to earth? Did he save any of the prototype?
Anyways, kinda a moot point =)
There's no reason to expect that spaceship fights would turn out any different.
There's a huge difference. The mass ratio between a missile and your plane is on the order of what, 1/100? On a spaceship you'll easily be 1000x that ratio. Moving a 3 ton missile vs a 300,000 ton spaceship is going to be a LOT easier to do, especially if you don't have scifi tech (or the ability to ignore physics) like inertial dampeners or omnidirectional phasers. But even in sci-fi you'd be much better off to launch a pile of missiles that can maneuver and travel 10x faster than you can to get there, and it's much more difficult to shoot them down. Plus you _can_ launch them from several light-second distances, which makes dogfights impossible anyways, even if you had omnidirectional lasers. Additionally space is much much bigger than what you can get in the air here, with no obligation to get close to your enemy.
And if you don't have scifi abilities, then you're most likely going to be stuck with a laser (or something) cannon, which won't be omnidirectional, thus requiring you to either move your ship or the laser around, which won't be fast. Plus at several light second distances, you won't be able to target your enemies anyways.
Modern day aircraft fights are
a) sensors/radar detect enemy fighters on approach
b) fighters scrambled
c) fighters lock on and fire missiles far out of range of sight (5+km away)
d) either your ECM works and you're ok, your missiles hit them and you win, or their missiles get you and you're dead. Either way the other party goes home, or mops up the mess.
apparently that was just a shadow of his hand,
but even if it wasn't, could you keep it down in that situation? I doubt that I could.
okokok, so "where no human has gone before" doesn't quite have the 'ring to it, but it works then.
However I think that the purpose of the "no one" can still work, it can still be our mandate to explore unexplored space...
My guess? Some weird fashion for body modification grips the Klingon Empire in the 23rd century.
My Guess? Producers said "we have a budget now and technology that we didn't have in the 60s! Make them look better!"
and besides, most people don't have the attention span to think like that. If non-wrinkly Klingons showed up the average viewer would be going "huh?"
Actually no ship should have lasers, or any other beam weapon for that matter. At least not as their primary kick'n'ass weapon.
They'd be pointless.
Any battle will most likely be faught at several light-second distances, and missiles with laser cannons would be far more likely a choice. Send out missiles with a nuke that channels all of it's power into a laser and blasts the enemy ship rather than risk having your ship hit. That and you should have a lot more manned/automatic fighters, as the main ship can't protect itself, especially without shields. IT'd get pulverized in no time.
The Speech by Cochran was LAME!
I'm sorry, but I thought that the whole idea of Cochran from the start was LAME^2000. Even giving them all the allowances that I could, the idea that some drunken loony converts an old missile into a warp vessel, and does this BEFORE any governmently funded operation did, that's FAR FAR FAR beyond any sort of credibility. And you'd assume that there was some sort of proof that a warp drive would work prior to him developing it, thus the governments would have poured a LOT of money into their space programs to develop this thing. And considering how even with 100s of professionals and weeks of checks on the launchpad we still have things go wrong, I find it VERY hard to even imagine that some drunk guy could do it. And to top it all off, the launch into space was far far far too unrealistic. You're being pushed back into your chair with many G's of force, you can't just lesurely move your hand out and flick some switches in chairs that look like they were ripped out of some old office. Actually I hated the entire plot of "First Contact", but watching troy get drunk was very funny. Aaahhhh
Sorry, had to get that out of my system. =)
Wow you tore a strip off it. Before I try to refute everything, is there any SF shows that you like? You do have to give them some leeway you know, and it is just a pilot.
Did anyone else notice the whole "Neptune and back in 6 minutes" thing? I worked it out, that's 87 times the speed of light. Not very fast if you plan on going anywhere outside of the nearest couple dozen star systems in any reasonable (few days) period of time.
I respect your comments, but I would like to advocate for the devil anyways =)
No universal translators-Hooray, a realistic look at meeting strangers...they're strange!
Don't know if this is a good idea, as you can't expect all aliens to speak the same language, much less fluently. I thought that the univ translator was a good idea, especially for contact with species that you've never met before/etc. And on what basis do we have to judge what "realistic aliens" would look like? They might look exactly like us, or like rocks, so as long as you can somehow differenciate them I think that's "realistic" enough for me.
There is potential for some ongoing plot lines, like the best of DS9.
Yeah, but I wonder how well they will be explored. That's one of the problems of having multiple writers is that you don't get very complicated or deep story arcs. I loved B5 for that, since every show was either written directly by or given to someone else who was told what to do by JMS. That allowed for some things that came up in first season to resurface again in the 3rd season, I loved that. I haven't seen anything remotely close to that in ST to date, and I hope that they really improve that, but I'm quite doubtful.
I didn't like the vulcan. She wasn't even hot enough to fill the 7/9 spot.
I'm somehow glad of that. 7of9 was FAR FAR FAR too "outplaced" for that show. She didn't belong there, muchless in that outfit all the time. SF isn't about having babes with huge breasts and minimal acting skill. I'd rather have more moderately good looking people. I think that Kira/Dax filled those roles well, and Kez (?) from DS9 (didn't watch it much, Neelix's girl) was good for that role too.
There wasn't a lot of character development
How much do you expect in the first 42 minute show? =) I loved B5 again for that, all of 1st season was pure character development and setting up all of the arcs that were going to happen in the story. I think that getting to know your characters is a VERY good thing, but again I fear about how well this will be done due to the multitude of authors thing. Or will there be only a couple authors? I'm not really sure on that whole count.
In any case, I guess they could change "where no man has gone before" to "where no man or woman or tentically thing of the 76a gender or the not quite so tentically thing of the 398s gender or the non-gendered blobs of planet Gorprim or..."
er, what's wrong with the "where no one has gone before"? Seems pretty slick to me.
Is a gender neutral language to be the end goal of reaching 50 years into the future?....REALLY?...
Er, isn't that 150 years? But in either case, mankind doesn't "decide" to make a gender neutral language. All it takes is for one person to coin a phrase and for people to use it to get around the him/her/their issue and the he/she/?it?/they issue, etc. Even today there are acceptable alternatives to most gender problems. And the term "guy" could have just become commonly accepted as gender inspecific (as it is mostly today), or even "man" could have become gender inspecific because everyone calls then "males" now. Just because a word means something today doesn't mean that it will mean the same thing 10 years from now, nevermind 50. Epistemology is really interesting.
And I have learned, because it is impossible to do otherwise, that you must give all SF shows a certain amount of slack.
For example, you must ignore the language issues to the most part. Yes, you will hear everything in english. Doesn't mean that they're speaking english, but we'll all hear it in that. And when interspecies communications takes effect with species that they just met for the first time, well, just let that one slide. It's cool if they attempt to compensate for this, but it's not a big deal.
Secondly, take things in stride on a consistancy point of view. That is to say that if they're consistantly inconsistent (to current life) in predictable ways, then get used to it. Don't complain because of the "woah captain, the [insert tech here] just ruptured and the [insert tech here] just [insert tech here]'ed" when it doesn't make a lot of sense or contradicts what happened 5 episodes before in the show. However where you can complain is when they contradict themselves in largly obvious ways. But if the show has defined that a "heisenburg compensator" will allow you to determine both the position and velocity of a particle at the same time, fine, as long as they keep it consistant inside the show.
Thirdly try to ignore things that can't really be helped without a great expense. If they're on Mars and gravity/the moon/some other planet looks about the same (obviously because it will be filmed the same!), go with it. If they say that one planet has a more orangish sun than yellow, but you see a yellow one in a later show, don't complain. However what you can complain about is things that could have easily been avoided. For example, on B5:Crusade there's one thing that stuck out in my mind like a sore thumb. There's a show where Gideon is in an encounter suit walking through a deck that has been depressurized, and not only is there papers all over the place, but as he walks by one it moves as if blown! If there's no air, you can't do that...
And finally give shows at least a few episodes to get their feet on the ground. Almost all shows kinda suck for a while and take some getting used to, epsecially if you're picky. I got tired of turning off my brain to watch SF so I just learned to change my perspective instead =) You don't need to be picky and displeased about everything, it's your choice (the generic pleural you that is).
what the hell did you call good ole Seven-Of-Nine then? Like that wasn't her whole purpose for being on the show... Or Dax&Kira (to a lesser extent), or Troy, or just about every woman on TOS with those super-mini skirts. yeaow.
here's the dumb question. Apparently the webhost got spooked when they looked at the logs to see that there was a file downloaded, or did the sysadmin just freak and call the cops anyways?
I.e. if there was reason to believe that this guy had downloaded files or otherwise stolen IP, then I can agree with the search being performed, however if there was no reason to believe this, I think that the cops were being too aggressive to search & cease his property without reason to believe that he had stolen anything.
However if there was logging that he had downloaded stuff, then why the hell didn't he erase the logs? If you have that level of access to something, why wouldn't you erase all your tracks? Seems a little daft to me...
I don't qualify?
I'd wager a guess that 99% of car trips in North America are less than 45 minutes. Probably 2/3rds are less than 30 minutes.
I have a CD player in my car, and a small binder with 10 cds in it. I find it a trivial task to change the CD, and I tend to only do that when I get in the car and turn it on. Even when driving it's not a difficult thing to do. Plus for those with decks, you don't even need to do that much.
If you use only real CDs (meaning commercial music) and not your own custom CDs, then I think that this might be useful. However by the very nature of this you're doing everything on MP3s and now that burners and disks are so cheap it's not worth the large cost of the device. I can easily understand why there was far insufficient demand to continue production of the device.
I also make trips about twice a month that are about an hour in length, and I never listen to the radio. I change the CD once or twice sometimes, and as I said, it's a trivial task.
Or just do what the rest of the world did, buy a $120-$160 decent CD player and just burn normal CDs/CDRWs.
I'm rarely in my car for > 30mins at a time, and with CDs being like $0.30 and drive speeds burning at 16x-24x (i.e. a few minutes), I'd just make a playlist, burn it while getting ready, and grab it 5 minutes later on the way out. I've got about 15 of these that have all of the music that I commonly listen to, and I rarely need to change CDs while driving.
there's a discrepancy on CNN's page :
this page shows 5 WTC being "in danger of collapse"
but this page shows it as either "collapsed or destroyed"
which case is true?
I know that in my proceedings to backup some of my DVDs, I found that a few of them were very difficult to rip properly. They'd all get errors in the decrypted vob files or just be unable to find the "key", but yet my settop DVD player could play them fine. Thoughts?
The reason why they use gold plating is because it doesn't rust or tarnish. Copper and silver do, thus degrading the connections over time. (as you mentioned)
You could use a wire from a twisted pair if you want, but where the quality comes in is: (a) defeating or blocking interferance and (b) the connections between the wires. If you have a shitty connection, you'll also get some signal reflection which will give undesired results. So those $100 cables at Circuit City have most likely been tested to the nines and are, in fact, better than most $15 cables, provided that you live in an extremely noisy environment and have a $5000 stereo system. But for most people who have a 100ft lengths was pretty easy (not to mention inexpensive too). I did, however, have to make a ground noise inhibitor on the TV side (fscking cable co's), but after that all was good.
They didn't need to smuggle, they were sent some!
my favorite:
When the Mir crew ran out of alcohol reserves, they would often go on "treasure-seeking" expeditions for more, tearing down interior panels to find bottles hidden by previous crews, said Alexander Poleshchuk, who spent six months on board Mir in 1993.
Ok, I wasn't sure and never tried, I must admit. I figured that you had to have a legal copy, and it'd phone the FBI on you if they found you were using a pirated copy, so I never tried =)
Umm, not that I'm using a pirated copy. (cough)
(sigh) true =)
Does anyone know about any programs like CNET's AutoUpdate program? That is pretty cool, it monitors all apps that you have installed on your system and informs you when there's updates. Besides from letting them know everything you're running, it's really nifty, and I think it does windows as well. That'd be cool.
I know that XP has a built in autoupdater that's much more aggressive at reminding you to update your system.
People that know where to find product keys/cracks/warez/illegal software/etc are much more likely to be concerned about the security of their computers and will apply the most patches. At least in my version of reality...
I would hazard a guess that you're thinking is a little tainted.
Don't forget that a lot of piracy is either (a) casual piracy, friend-to-friend or (b) corporate piracy. In both of those 2 cases they are unlikely to be savvy enough to think much about that. I have also many friends who are using... er, testing MS products that don't think about that either.
To be honest, I have never tried windows update because I figured that it needed a legit copy, but I guess that it would be more in MS's best interests if you didn't need that. Does it work without a legit copy? I just always went to the MS site directly.
I was going to say (although I never use it) that I was pretty sure that you could get all updates on Windows Update, hence the name...
IIS is an application server.
Apache is a web server.
Big difference.
Apache can get plugins to make it a web server, now, yes. Ok. =)
And please, people, read my post before arguing it (not just you).
Telek> unfortunately in this case longer means a more convoluted codebase
jallen02> And just because a project has been around longer also does not mean a convolouted codebase
As in, in this case the code (might) be a lot more convoluted, with a heavier API, due (in part) to it's age. Maybe. In this case.
Most of these exploits are occuring in rather small modules, which would obviously have a much smaller amount of code than the main IIS
(sigh). You got me there. Open source does have it's benefits (other than being open and free of course) =)
I just don't buy the argument the code is more confusing on a basis of age only
I never said only. And I'm just extrapolating from looking at the APIs, which are rather large. I really have no idea about the codebase, other than rumours that I have heard.
FYI IE 5.0 SP1 solved the problem.
I've tested on several machines here running 5.0 SP1 and they had no problems at all with the page.