I don't really "look" for things on airplanes either. I sit quietly and/or try to sleep, and fly with the single goal of getting to my destination. The airport bar and in-flight drinks are frequently helpful to make the sleeping happen.
It's actually kind of nice that they did approve it. I'd like to see the laptop fuel cells hit mainstream, so I can try to get more time out of my laptop. I have a Clevo, with a 15" screen and a 2.4Ghz processor. It sucks up the battery in about an hour, with no cards in. It takes hours to charge, so the layovers are never enough to get the battery up for another flight.
I'm not really concerned that someone will try to blow up a plane I'm on, I just don't like that they do all this pretending that they're making things so secure, and have no clue at all.
Well, from what I understand, they aren't simply pressurized hydrogen cans. They use methanol, but still, it's a potentially hazardous fuel.
But, security on aircraft are a joke anyways. You could carry bottles of almost anything on a plane. A friend of mine filled a Dr. Pepper bottle full of Captain Morgan's spiced rum, and carried it on with her. She was a bit of a drunk. (Ok, a regular alcoholic). They didn't even notice the color was wrong. Hell, Cap't Morgans looks more like gasoline than Dr. Pepper. They didn't question the fact that she was carrying it on. What if it was 151 in a sprite or water bottle? Or "white gasoline"?
But really, how many perfectly common items are dangerous?
Butane from a common disposable lighter can be used to fill a bag or balloon, and combust rapidly.
Me smacking someone in the head with a hardback copy of War and Peace would be deadlier than a pair of fingernail clippers.
Or as an old ex-military man I once knew said, he could kill a man with a rolled up newspaper. It's not the item, it's how it's used.
I'd be willing to bet most women's purses are the most dangerous things on an airplane. If you won't believe me, tell your wife/girlfriend that she's ugly so you're sleeping with the new 19 year old secretary at work, and then dare her to hit you with her purse.:)
I think it's stupid that I have to put my screwdriver in checked luggage. Hell, I might fix the tray table so it doesn't flop down by itself while we're flying. Forbid the thought.
I recently attached my little 802.11b antenna to the top of my laptop. I leave the wire coiled up. *EVERY* time I go through security now, they look at it like it's a bomb. I had one security guard who couldn't even recognize it's a laptop. He was like "What is that?" Ummm, a laptop dude. How the hell are they suppose to recognize a home made explosive device, if they can't even identify common electronics?? I could have told him it was a toaster, and he would have believed me.
It sounds very Borg-ish. No longer using the brain to run the muscles, but using the brain to talk to the computer, which in turn talks to the muscles.
We bought two Promise 15100 arrays, and put in 30 250Gb drives. Sometimes an array is wanted to be sometimes large, sometimes redundant, and in this case, both.
Ya, the viewer I was refering to would be an average person standing. My dad told me a long time ago that it was 15 miles. He explained it to me once when we were at a beach, looking at boats on the horizon, and we could see them disappearing. i.e., viewer at sea level.:)
He was a research scientist, so most little tidbits like that were fairly accurate. I never bothered to figure it out.
You're right about the not quite straight path. I have an excellent book on microwave communications, which does talk about paths bending over mountains, and the atmosphere bending signals. They were still pretty clear that you want to be able to see your target (at least theoretically, if the distance is far enough), without anything near your path to interfer with the fresnal zone. At 40 miles, if you only just achieved line of site, the ground would seriously interfere with the signal.
I'm lucky with my long distance 802.11b connection, it goes from a 2nd story roof top, to the 10th floor of a building. It's only 1/2 mile, but I have perfect line of sight. I had to trim a few trees close to the house side because when the wind blew, the top of it would come into my fresnal zone and mess up my signal. Once I got rid of the damned trees, it stays at 100% signal strength all the time. Wheeee! That's with a 24dBi parabolic dish, and a 14dBi panel, and Linksys WAP11's at each end. Having good antennas is a great thing. The same WAP11's with the stock omnidirectional antennas were lucky to get 85% signal strength across a room in the same building.
If they're just opening the file on me, I'd be surprised.
Too bad I can't make it this year. I made plans, thinking DefCon was in mid-August. Oops.
This sounds like a game I'd like to play (the wireless thing). Spotting the feds would be too easy. Now, bugging the Fed's phone would be more fun..:) Wiring a feds room for video and sound, *THAT* would be entertaining.
If I remember the original articles on this topic, the monkey started out with moving it's hand, to do the functions it was thinking of. Over time, it got lazy to the point of not even moving it's arm, to achieve the same results.
But now, if we all did this, how much lazier would we get. Hell, we went from an agrarian society a few hundred years ago (like, most people were all hunter/gatherers or farmers), to the industrial age where we busted ass in factories to make things to make our work easier, to today, where we sit in front of glowing screens, pushing little buttons to talk to people all over the planet. Speeds for this communication is no longer measured in the days or weeks that it would take for a letter to travel that distance, but the milliseconds it takes for the packets to travel. For me, Slashdot is 30ms from where I'm sitting, or 6 hours by car. That 340 miles would easily have been weeks for a message like this to get there not very long ago.
If adapting neural monitoring technology to this global network happens any time soon, we'll see people get fatter and lazier than they are now. Hell, how many people on here can lift 200 pounds? Ok, that's retorical, I know that all kinds of people read/., and I'm even active in my real life. I spent the morning working in my cars, but I spent the afternoon looking for new car parts online (I'm considering new heads and cam for my car now). Of all the people I frequently deal with in real life, I'm the only one who would know how to actually install those parts, or more importantly, would actually be willing to do it, rather than the lazy "pay someone else to do it" method.
But with all that said, I'd love it. I won't be one of those fatter, lazier people. I will love to be one of the first to play with neural technology when it's availble to the general public (well, us). I had looked at some of the available software/hardware before, but maybe I'll actually give building some of this a try this time.
They were portscanning everyone, and aparently cutting people of for just about nothing. Like, how dangerous is a free roaming DNS server? It was up to date, it just wasn't configured for anything at all, except to cache my resolutions.
I've annoyed a few ISP's, by refusing to use my account with them. I have a perfectly good (like, *REALLY* good) mail server where I work. I use that. Why do I have to feel locked into a provider, just to deal with messages that are stuck in their queue for hours or days?
I usually try out the provider's mail server when I change connectivity providers, and then come to the same decision I always do. I don't use their account. Why should I deal with it? When I check back into the account later, it's usually full of spam. That's funny, since I didn't give out the address. Oh, some mininum wage tech with too much access sold the user list again. That happens a little too often.
I'm a bit more skilled than average Joe-user, but hey, there are plenty more like me. I read from my company mail server using IMAP, and send from my local machine using sendmail. Big deal. So 10 to 20 emails per day go out from my IP. At least right now I'm in control of my connectivity.
I've used providers who block all kinds of things, usually arbitrarly. RoadRunner got rather pissed off at me once because I ran a caching DNS server at my house. They didn't quite grasp the concept that 30 seconds to resolve a hostname was unacceptable, knowing it should take a fraction of a second. They cut my service without notice for it, and it took plenty of screaming to get it turned back on.
Myself, when I set up a firewall, I already block everything coming in and going out, and then allow on an as-needed basis. I feel that's the way it should be done.
Should that be disturbing that you're familiar with the phrase? I wouldn't have known to look for that. Well, I don't usually look for escorts, but hey...:)
Change your name to Mud, move to Iceland, and buy a lemming farm. The property next door to mine is for sale. It's nice and quiet here, and you can't possibly make another mistake that'll leave a big company hunting you down for their million dollar losses.
I bought a Sony DCR-HC12 a few weeks ago, and am very happy with the results. I've edited some into fairly professional looking video, but others have carried it around, and it looks like amateur home video footage. Really, it's all in how you shoot. The camera doesn't make you a professional. Good camera work, good lighting, good sets, good editing, and good camera friendly talent are all very important.
I have access to much better cameras, but this is small enough for me to stick in my pocket, and not kill my arm shooting for hours. The Canon XL1s is very popular. It's full of really nice features (the steady shot is amazing), but if you have no experience with shooting video professionally, I'd make a better video than you with an old Sony Handycam.
It's a girl that you can take out, romance, get sex from, and there's never the question of if she's going to be all sweet to you the whole time. You're almost guaranteed to get sex out of it (unless you're particuarly ugly or stink).
She's not going to ask you to buy her expensive things to keep the relationship going. She's not going to want to move in. She's not going to always call you to nag. You get exactly what you want from the relationship, and no baggage from it. She's never going to say "You're seeing another woman!" She's not going to bitch that you didn't do the dishes last night. She's not even going to complain about the week old pizza box still in the living room.
And you're getting sex from someone with a whole lot more practice. She knows how to move to pleasure a guy, not some girl that is still trying to get it right. Think of it like a professional job. Would you want someone flying you in a a 747 to have a couple hundred hours in one type of plane, or someone who's flown them all for thousands of hours. I'd want one that knows all the tricks, and knows how to make my 'flight' as comfortable as possible.
Financially, a girlfriend costs a *LOT* more than a hourly girlfriend. Remember that next time you're out shopping for jewerly with her because if you don't, she's leaving you.
That's why I did the servers first. I like wiping out everything except for a few configuration files, and all the user data, and reinstalling everything else.
But, my workstations, I'm a bit more attached to. I have all kinds of crap that I install and scatter all over the place. I actually did fine with the Slack 9.0 to Slack 9.1 upgrade, so I don't know why I'm nervous. Once I do one, I'll be fine. Maybe I'll try an upgrade, see if it hoses anything, and then do a fresh install (keeping my files, of course)
I can almost agree with the promotions. All the main characters would be higher ranking than they were. But are you sure about the transfers? I'd think they'd want to keep the number of people knowing about the project as small as possible, to prevent leaks. Keep the people working on the project happy and well paid, but don't let them out.
Imagine.. ummmm, what's his name, the guy who works the iris.. he goes out drinkin' one night a year after he's transfered off to some BS assignment (definately not as exciting as SGC), and starts blabbing in the bar about the SGC..
Well, who would believe it.
"Ya, I worked at this super secret government operation where we have a device that lets you travel between planets in our galaxy and there's a whole bunch of evil aliens out there that are trying to conquer us."
Of course, I'm a believer in the fact that the government *DOES* do plenty of stuff without telling us about it, and reinforce their protection with plausible deniability. They referenced it in the show with allowing the "Wormhole Extreme" show to be made.
Just think of how many really whacked out scenerios the government potentially covered up with just the X-Files. I'm not saying the shows were based on real things, but if any one episode had a factual basis, the simple defense is "Oh, you saw that in an X-Files episode"
The only way to ever prove it is if the governments of the world take on a full disclosure platform. Imagine what would happen if absolutely every government facility were open to the press. Sure, go ahead, take your cameras in. No video, pictures, or reports of names, faces, written documents, or broadcast of current tactics. A horde of press corps guys go running into Area 51, cameras rolling, and see a bunch of failed experemental aircraft, and an illegal oil dump. Or they see a bunch of alien aircraft, and a bunch of little green men tuning up their spaceships.:)
I just think it would be fun to include this ability in a show. The character Col. Jack O'Neill isn't dumb, quite the opposite. Given his background in special ops (I even choose to overlook the fact that the Air Force doesn't really have a Special Ops group like the SEALS), he likely already knows a few other languages. Teal'c definately knows at least two.
Most officers aren't exactly stupid.. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe you must have a bachlors degree to get any sort of officer rank, no matter how talented you may be. Being dumb, and playing dumb are two different things. For example, walk into my office when I don't want to cooperate and ask me anything. I may have forgotten even my own name. Sometimes it's safer to be like that. Dumb people don't know anything and aren't worth bothering for information. Not so smart people get bothered all the time. Playing dumb has helped me out of plenty of situations. I don't know anything unless I want to.
Ok, so O'Neill doesn't have a grasp of astrophysics, (or plays like he doesn't). No one's going to ask him to do anything like fix a DHD. But he is responsible for being a military leader, so he does that effectively. You've never seen him trying to figure out which end is the working end of a P90.
The show would be pretty boring if every alien spoke a different language. Every conversation would be through Jackson, and that'd get old *REALLY* quick. Well, it would have been harder for that year that he was dead too.
'm going to go with crazyaxemaniac here; you can't learn a language just by doing one translation. Even the first time I saw it, I knew that when Jack corrects Daniel, he was just shortcircuiting to a decision Daniel eventually came too; odds are Jack heard it a couple of times before remembering.
If I remember the episode right, they were in the loop, Daniel suggested that since they had all the time in the world to figure it out, maybe they should learn the language to do the translation. So they learned the language to do the translation, not just hit and miss interpretations out of a book.
And juggling.
And making out with Carter. (whoohoo)
And stargate-golf.
But through each iteration, O'Neill and Teal'c remembered.. And if I remember right, at the end of the episode, they were still the only ones who remembered any of it.
I think it was 100 or so partial days, so they couldn't have a full grasp of the language.
But hey, it's TV.. So the writers "forget" that they learned anything. Big deal.:)
It's the same reason the unnamed Star Trek guys in red uniforms would be dead within minutes of landing on a planet, and all the stars would survive seemingly deadly wounds.
So far, O'Neill, Carter, and Jackson have had their consciousness sucked out of their bodies and deposited into computers, and they've all traded bodies at least once.
They've all been shot, and beaten. They've all been killed (or mostly dead) at least once. But no, send the nice Doc Janet through the gate once, and she survives just a couple minutes.
I'm still wondering when or how the air force built all those fighters for last epsiode of last season. Since they obviously aren't using regular gov't contractors for the build, and they would have taken years building those anyways, who did it?:) But hey, it's TV, they can bend logic as they see fit to make an interesting show.
It's really amazing what they've done with the single concept of "What if the pyramids were made by aliens"
Slashdot Mirror
Any 386 or better, my son..
I don't really "look" for things on airplanes either. I sit quietly and/or try to sleep, and fly with the single goal of getting to my destination. The airport bar and in-flight drinks are frequently helpful to make the sleeping happen.
It's actually kind of nice that they did approve it. I'd like to see the laptop fuel cells hit mainstream, so I can try to get more time out of my laptop. I have a Clevo, with a 15" screen and a 2.4Ghz processor. It sucks up the battery in about an hour, with no cards in. It takes hours to charge, so the layovers are never enough to get the battery up for another flight.
I'm not really concerned that someone will try to blow up a plane I'm on, I just don't like that they do all this pretending that they're making things so secure, and have no clue at all.
Well, from what I understand, they aren't simply pressurized hydrogen cans. They use methanol, but still, it's a potentially hazardous fuel.
:)
But, security on aircraft are a joke anyways. You could carry bottles of almost anything on a plane. A friend of mine filled a Dr. Pepper bottle full of Captain Morgan's spiced rum, and carried it on with her. She was a bit of a drunk. (Ok, a regular alcoholic). They didn't even notice the color was wrong. Hell, Cap't Morgans looks more like gasoline than Dr. Pepper. They didn't question the fact that she was carrying it on. What if it was 151 in a sprite or water bottle? Or "white gasoline"?
But really, how many perfectly common items are dangerous?
Butane from a common disposable lighter can be used to fill a bag or balloon, and combust rapidly.
Me smacking someone in the head with a hardback copy of War and Peace would be deadlier than a pair of fingernail clippers.
Or as an old ex-military man I once knew said, he could kill a man with a rolled up newspaper. It's not the item, it's how it's used.
I'd be willing to bet most women's purses are the most dangerous things on an airplane. If you won't believe me, tell your wife/girlfriend that she's ugly so you're sleeping with the new 19 year old secretary at work, and then dare her to hit you with her purse.
I think it's stupid that I have to put my screwdriver in checked luggage. Hell, I might fix the tray table so it doesn't flop down by itself while we're flying. Forbid the thought.
I recently attached my little 802.11b antenna to the top of my laptop. I leave the wire coiled up. *EVERY* time I go through security now, they look at it like it's a bomb. I had one security guard who couldn't even recognize it's a laptop. He was like "What is that?" Ummm, a laptop dude. How the hell are they suppose to recognize a home made explosive device, if they can't even identify common electronics?? I could have told him it was a toaster, and he would have believed me.
We are Borg.
Resistance Is Futile.
Prepare To Be Assimilated.
(hehe)
It sounds very Borg-ish. No longer using the brain to run the muscles, but using the brain to talk to the computer, which in turn talks to the muscles.
Actually, some businesses *DO* want the capacity.
We bought two Promise 15100 arrays, and put in 30 250Gb drives. Sometimes an array is wanted to be sometimes large, sometimes redundant, and in this case, both.
Ya, the viewer I was refering to would be an average person standing. My dad told me a long time ago that it was 15 miles. He explained it to me once when we were at a beach, looking at boats on the horizon, and we could see them disappearing. i.e., viewer at sea level.
He was a research scientist, so most little tidbits like that were fairly accurate. I never bothered to figure it out.
You're right about the not quite straight path. I have an excellent book on microwave communications, which does talk about paths bending over mountains, and the atmosphere bending signals. They were still pretty clear that you want to be able to see your target (at least theoretically, if the distance is far enough), without anything near your path to interfer with the fresnal zone. At 40 miles, if you only just achieved line of site, the ground would seriously interfere with the signal.
I'm lucky with my long distance 802.11b connection, it goes from a 2nd story roof top, to the 10th floor of a building. It's only 1/2 mile, but I have perfect line of sight. I had to trim a few trees close to the house side because when the wind blew, the top of it would come into my fresnal zone and mess up my signal. Once I got rid of the damned trees, it stays at 100% signal strength all the time. Wheeee! That's with a 24dBi parabolic dish, and a 14dBi panel, and Linksys WAP11's at each end. Having good antennas is a great thing. The same WAP11's with the stock omnidirectional antennas were lucky to get 85% signal strength across a room in the same building.
Ummmm.. Ya..
:)
Be careful, someone may take that seriously.
"Hey Dave, I ran 40 miles of Cat5, and it doesn't seem to work!"
In past years, they've had shooting (like bang-bang guns) contests. so this may be more accurate than you may think. {grin}
I thught horizon was 15 miles from a viewer at sea level on flat terrain. But ya, they'll need good altitude at one or both ends.
If they're just opening the file on me, I'd be surprised.
:) Wiring a feds room for video and sound, *THAT* would be entertaining.
Too bad I can't make it this year. I made plans, thinking DefCon was in mid-August. Oops.
This sounds like a game I'd like to play (the wireless thing). Spotting the feds would be too easy. Now, bugging the Fed's phone would be more fun..
s/monkeys/users/g
If I remember the original articles on this topic, the monkey started out with moving it's hand, to do the functions it was thinking of. Over time, it got lazy to the point of not even moving it's arm, to achieve the same results.
But now, if we all did this, how much lazier would we get. Hell, we went from an agrarian society a few hundred years ago (like, most people were all hunter/gatherers or farmers), to the industrial age where we busted ass in factories to make things to make our work easier, to today, where we sit in front of glowing screens, pushing little buttons to talk to people all over the planet. Speeds for this communication is no longer measured in the days or weeks that it would take for a letter to travel that distance, but the milliseconds it takes for the packets to travel. For me, Slashdot is 30ms from where I'm sitting, or 6 hours by car. That 340 miles would easily have been weeks for a message like this to get there not very long ago.
If adapting neural monitoring technology to this global network happens any time soon, we'll see people get fatter and lazier than they are now. Hell, how many people on here can lift 200 pounds? Ok, that's retorical, I know that all kinds of people read
But with all that said, I'd love it. I won't be one of those fatter, lazier people. I will love to be one of the first to play with neural technology when it's availble to the general public (well, us). I had looked at some of the available software/hardware before, but maybe I'll actually give building some of this a try this time.
echo "nameserver 127.0.0.1" >
They were portscanning everyone, and aparently cutting people of for just about nothing. Like, how dangerous is a free roaming DNS server? It was up to date, it just wasn't configured for anything at all, except to cache my resolutions.
I've annoyed a few ISP's, by refusing to use my account with them. I have a perfectly good (like, *REALLY* good) mail server where I work. I use that. Why do I have to feel locked into a provider, just to deal with messages that are stuck in their queue for hours or days?
I usually try out the provider's mail server when I change connectivity providers, and then come to the same decision I always do. I don't use their account. Why should I deal with it? When I check back into the account later, it's usually full of spam. That's funny, since I didn't give out the address. Oh, some mininum wage tech with too much access sold the user list again. That happens a little too often.
I'm a bit more skilled than average Joe-user, but hey, there are plenty more like me. I read from my company mail server using IMAP, and send from my local machine using sendmail. Big deal. So 10 to 20 emails per day go out from my IP. At least right now I'm in control of my connectivity.
I've used providers who block all kinds of things, usually arbitrarly. RoadRunner got rather pissed off at me once because I ran a caching DNS server at my house. They didn't quite grasp the concept that 30 seconds to resolve a hostname was unacceptable, knowing it should take a fraction of a second. They cut my service without notice for it, and it took plenty of screaming to get it turned back on.
Myself, when I set up a firewall, I already block everything coming in and going out, and then allow on an as-needed basis. I feel that's the way it should be done.
Should that be disturbing that you're familiar with the phrase? I wouldn't have known to look for that. Well, I don't usually look for escorts, but hey... :)
Nope, I have a really expensive girlfriend.
Change your name to Mud, move to Iceland, and buy a lemming farm. The property next door to mine is for sale. It's nice and quiet here, and you can't possibly make another mistake that'll leave a big company hunting you down for their million dollar losses.
I bought a Sony DCR-HC12 a few weeks ago, and am very happy with the results. I've edited some into fairly professional looking video, but others have carried it around, and it looks like amateur home video footage. Really, it's all in how you shoot. The camera doesn't make you a professional. Good camera work, good lighting, good sets, good editing, and good camera friendly talent are all very important.
I have access to much better cameras, but this is small enough for me to stick in my pocket, and not kill my arm shooting for hours. The Canon XL1s is very popular. It's full of really nice features (the steady shot is amazing), but if you have no experience with shooting video professionally, I'd make a better video than you with an old Sony Handycam.
Well...
It's a girl that you can take out, romance, get sex from, and there's never the question of if she's going to be all sweet to you the whole time. You're almost guaranteed to get sex out of it (unless you're particuarly ugly or stink).
She's not going to ask you to buy her expensive things to keep the relationship going. She's not going to want to move in. She's not going to always call you to nag. You get exactly what you want from the relationship, and no baggage from it. She's never going to say "You're seeing another woman!" She's not going to bitch that you didn't do the dishes last night. She's not even going to complain about the week old pizza box still in the living room.
And you're getting sex from someone with a whole lot more practice. She knows how to move to pleasure a guy, not some girl that is still trying to get it right. Think of it like a professional job. Would you want someone flying you in a a 747 to have a couple hundred hours in one type of plane, or someone who's flown them all for thousands of hours. I'd want one that knows all the tricks, and knows how to make my 'flight' as comfortable as possible.
Financially, a girlfriend costs a *LOT* more than a hourly girlfriend. Remember that next time you're out shopping for jewerly with her because if you don't, she's leaving you.
In your local free paper? Craigs List?
----
Attractive women wanted for amateur adult video. $200 per session.
Contact (555) 555-5555, or amateurvids@example.com
----
That's why I did the servers first. I like wiping out everything except for a few configuration files, and all the user data, and reinstalling everything else.
But, my workstations, I'm a bit more attached to. I have all kinds of crap that I install and scatter all over the place. I actually did fine with the Slack 9.0 to Slack 9.1 upgrade, so I don't know why I'm nervous. Once I do one, I'll be fine. Maybe I'll try an upgrade, see if it hoses anything, and then do a fresh install (keeping my files, of course)
I can almost agree with the promotions. All the main characters would be higher ranking than they were. But are you sure about the transfers? I'd think they'd want to keep the number of people knowing about the project as small as possible, to prevent leaks. Keep the people working on the project happy and well paid, but don't let them out.
.. ummmm, what's his name, the guy who works the iris .. he goes out drinkin' one night a year after he's transfered off to some BS assignment (definately not as exciting as SGC), and starts blabbing in the bar about the SGC..
:)
Imagine
Well, who would believe it.
"Ya, I worked at this super secret government operation where we have a device that lets you travel between planets in our galaxy and there's a whole bunch of evil aliens out there that are trying to conquer us."
Of course, I'm a believer in the fact that the government *DOES* do plenty of stuff without telling us about it, and reinforce their protection with plausible deniability. They referenced it in the show with allowing the "Wormhole Extreme" show to be made.
Just think of how many really whacked out scenerios the government potentially covered up with just the X-Files. I'm not saying the shows were based on real things, but if any one episode had a factual basis, the simple defense is "Oh, you saw that in an X-Files episode"
The only way to ever prove it is if the governments of the world take on a full disclosure platform. Imagine what would happen if absolutely every government facility were open to the press. Sure, go ahead, take your cameras in. No video, pictures, or reports of names, faces, written documents, or broadcast of current tactics. A horde of press corps guys go running into Area 51, cameras rolling, and see a bunch of failed experemental aircraft, and an illegal oil dump. Or they see a bunch of alien aircraft, and a bunch of little green men tuning up their spaceships.
Most officers aren't exactly stupid.. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe you must have a bachlors degree to get any sort of officer rank, no matter how talented you may be. Being dumb, and playing dumb are two different things. For example, walk into my office when I don't want to cooperate and ask me anything. I may have forgotten even my own name. Sometimes it's safer to be like that. Dumb people don't know anything and aren't worth bothering for information. Not so smart people get bothered all the time. Playing dumb has helped me out of plenty of situations. I don't know anything unless I want to.
Ok, so O'Neill doesn't have a grasp of astrophysics, (or plays like he doesn't). No one's going to ask him to do anything like fix a DHD. But he is responsible for being a military leader, so he does that effectively. You've never seen him trying to figure out which end is the working end of a P90.
The show would be pretty boring if every alien spoke a different language. Every conversation would be through Jackson, and that'd get old *REALLY* quick. Well, it would have been harder for that year that he was dead too.
If I remember the episode right, they were in the loop, Daniel suggested that since they had all the time in the world to figure it out, maybe they should learn the language to do the translation. So they learned the language to do the translation, not just hit and miss interpretations out of a book.
And juggling.
And making out with Carter. (whoohoo)
And stargate-golf.
But through each iteration, O'Neill and Teal'c remembered.. And if I remember right, at the end of the episode, they were still the only ones who remembered any of it.
I think it was 100 or so partial days, so they couldn't have a full grasp of the language.
But hey, it's TV.. So the writers "forget" that they learned anything. Big deal.
Ahhhh, television/movie physics..
:) But hey, it's TV, they can bend logic as they see fit to make an interesting show.
It's the same reason the unnamed Star Trek guys in red uniforms would be dead within minutes of landing on a planet, and all the stars would survive seemingly deadly wounds.
So far, O'Neill, Carter, and Jackson have had their consciousness sucked out of their bodies and deposited into computers, and they've all traded bodies at least once.
They've all been shot, and beaten. They've all been killed (or mostly dead) at least once. But no, send the nice Doc Janet through the gate once, and she survives just a couple minutes.
I'm still wondering when or how the air force built all those fighters for last epsiode of last season. Since they obviously aren't using regular gov't contractors for the build, and they would have taken years building those anyways, who did it?
It's really amazing what they've done with the single concept of "What if the pyramids were made by aliens"