Everyone knows that the KGB had hot russian chicks as their spies. Haven't you ever watched a James Bond movie?:)
Well, it's shown in reality too. Some are: Anna Chapman, Anna Fermanova, Patricia Mills, Krystyna Skarbek, Josephine Baker, and Violette Szabo. They don't exactly resemble the Bond girls though. I'm still trying to figure out how to convince a hot russian spy chick that I have secrets worth seducing. It's not that I'd give them up, but the seduction is always fun.:)
Oh, I definitely know the difference between the dramatizations of explosions, and the actual fact. I used to play amateur pyromaniac, which is now reserved for the 4th of July and New Years Eve.:)
A big fire is still a threat though. I'll use an extreme case as an example.
Several years ago (probably close to 10 years) at about 4am was a gas tanker truck driving along on a wide road (4 lanes, limited access). The left exit lane was well marked that there was a sharp turn ahead, and the indicated speed was 25mph. The other three lanes continued straight head at 55mph. Most of the traffic on that part of the road continues on to a freeway, so they're typically driving 65mph to 70mph.
The trucker was apparently tired, and misjudged the turn. Well, he realized what he was about to do just as he got to the turn. He managed to get the truck turned, but it rolled over in the underpass.
Hollywood would have filmed this as a huge explosion, bridge pieces falling for miles, etc, etc. Instead, the driver came to, climbed out of the truck which was now burning, and ran for safety. It was a very hot nasty fire, and it did melt the concrete and steel in the overpass. Us locals weren't very happy that one of the major freeways was closed for about a year while they rebuilt the bridge.
So, wearing a 5 gallon gas can with a 1Kw generator isn't necessarily dangerous. Parts can go flying (ask mechanics about throwing a rod through the block, and they'll have some stories to tell, and sometimes parts). 5 gallons of burning gasoline isn't exactly going to be a comfortable place to be. It's not going to be like setting off a pound of C4 in your backpack, but it can kill you, especially if you can't get out of the rig that you're tied to.
I wouldn't be that surprised to see propane fueled generator used. I didn't see an indication of how much power is needed, but capacitors/batteries for surge capacity (lifting something heavy), and a small generator to keep nominal power supplied would seem easy enough.
One of the things I've been doing lately is repairing small generators (4-6kw). A friend of mine has a tiny 1kw gas generator. Converting over to propane isn't all that hard. The same conversion from gasoline to propane could be used for hydrogen. With any of the fuels or lithium ion batteries, there is an explosion risk. If the soldier wearing it gets shot wearing this armor (assuming they cover those gaping holes) gets shot in the armor, he may live. If the same shot caused an explosion in the fuel supply, that's not so good. Then again, if it's deployed in a war zone, getting shot wearing some armor is preferable to getting shot wearing no armor.
A quad band GSM phone should work just about anywhere. I've known some people who travel around the world a good bit, and they have service just about everywhere. One person I knew from Europe continued to use his GSM phone here in the US. The phone showed the provider name, and it would switch the displayed carrier name when he arrived in the US, and it continued to work. Unfortunately, quad band GSM phones are not exactly normal in the US.
I use Boost Mobile now (cheapest rates for prepaid unlimited). Even they use two different services. Their low end phones are iDen. Some of their better phones (like the Blackberry) use CDMA. I have no expectation that it would work in other countries. A while back, I had a Verizon CDMA phone. It worked in the US and parts of Canada. In Mexico (near the US border) I sometimes had voice service, but most of the time the voice service didn't work, but text messaging still did work.
Eventually, I intend to buy a multi-sim quad band phone from eBay, and use the sim of the day in it.
I seriously doubt that would happen. You and I are end consumers. We each count for one phone each (usually). The cell provider is the big customer. They buy in bulk of tens of thousands. It's pretty clear who has the leverage. It's in the best interest of the cell phone provider to have the phones locked to their company. That's why the US providers haven't migrated to the defacto international standard GSM. They don't want people buying their subsidized phone, and then jumping ship when it's obvious the customer will jump ship to the better provider who charges more for the phone itself.
Well, that kind of sucks, doesn't it? Both my real name and online alias match a whole lot of people. There are regular folks, and some well respected folks (doctors, scientists, and talented artists). Even cities that I've lived in had multiple people with my names. With a common name, I'm less likely to get the random stalker or other undesirables. I've known people with more unique names, and a few misplaced words online will get the undesirables crawling out of the woodwork.
The difference is that they are actually altering the content. What if the telephone company could re-order the words you speak, or perhaps substitute other words "as good as" your own, in order to make their voice-compression algorithms more efficient? Would you agree to that?
But, it's optimizing the HTML, not changing the content of your message. In the context of a phone call, it would be like if they took your analog phone signal (like, from the handset), compressed it and then transmitted it in a form that the other side could understand. The end result remains the same.
Oh, that already happens.
There are plenty of telco's that switch you from analog to digital to send down the wire, just to convert on the other side. How many calls can you send down a T1? There are 25 analog channels. Depending on the encoding and compression, you can get 125+ calls down the same wire. You may not know it's there, but it is. If the telco can shove 5x the number of calls down the same wire, with a bit of hardware investment, they can (and have) do it.
Back to the actual issue, automatic optimization of the html. Do you complain when whatever hosting company you're using does gzip compression on your outbound data? I didn't think so. This is a CDN, their job is to take your data, distribute it to their edge nodes, and get it to the customer as quickly as possible. That's exactly why you'd go with a CDN. I did a bit of this on my own, with my dynamically generated pages. I actually turn it on and off on occasion. The cleaned pages render faster, but it's harder to find bugs in the code. On the other hand, even though the site is dynamic, I don't go around mucking about in the HTML parts of the code very often.
So, with that argument busted, what was your next one?
Most of the world shifted from being hunter-gatherers (with some exceptions) to agrarian systems an awful long time ago. For most civilized countries, hunting became a sport, not a means of survival. For the most part, we survive on domesticated animals and farm raised plants, which are purchased in local stores. There are exceptions, but those are few and far between, and even then, you probably wouldn't be posting to Slashdot if you were there.
Don't try to fool yourself, only a very small percentage of those living in modern society could live without our modern infrastructure. Ask your average city dweller to catch a pigeon.
Google and Netflix are already paying for their upstream bandwidth
A lot of people really don't understand that. They probably have cheap hosting accounts, and have never needed to deal with actual circuits.
I've worked at places with multiple GigE circuits. Besides the base cost in the datacenter (floor space, power, port charges, etc), we had negotiated contracts on bandwidth. 95th percentile is that bastard of a number that we deal with all the time. For those that don't know, it goes something like this. The uplink provider monitors our ports once every 5 minutes. At the end of the month, they take all the samples, sort them by utilization, and knock off the top 5%. Whatever that next number is, is what we pay. There are dedicated rates too. If you don't use the line, that doesn't matter, you're paying at lest a minimum fixed amount, which could be something like 20% of the line capacity. So an idle datacenter with nothing in it, but it has a GigE circuit could cost as if we were using 200Mb/s at 95th percentile.
For our bills, it was easily over $100,000/mo. That's a conservative number, but I haven't been there in a while, and don't remember how high it really went. Do you want fancier services, like multiple circuits into your space, BGP routing, etc? Oh, the price goes way up. When you get big enough, and want to get your data to the customers faster, you start doing private peerings, and putting out edge nodes (servers closer to the clients, like Akamai provides), or even putting dedicated servers in on the end user networks. They don't like paying huge bandwidth and peering bills, when they can deploy $100k worth of equipment two hops from the customer.
If NetFlix is sucking up so much bandwidth, someone's making a fortune on it already. So it accounts for 20%, big deal, that doesn't indicate the total utilization of the available, or even where it was measured. I played this game once. I took the total bandwidth my company used during peak hours, and compared it to the Mae East bandwidth graphs (when they were public). Our bandwidth used 15% of what Mae East passed. And guess what. It didn't destroy the world. We weren't even responsible for 15% of what passed through Mae East, because various peerings meant our traffic went in all kinds of different directions.
By that standard, NetFlix could use 200% of what passes through Mae East (plural now), and even that wouldn't mean anything other than bragging rights. Sure, it's a lot of bandwidth, but it doesn't indicate saturation of available resources, nor the end of anything at all.
And exactly how are they catching wild owls? Have you ever tried to catch a wild bird? The closest I've ever gotten to a wild owl was probably 30 feet. Well, with one exception, but it had a broken wing, was blind in one eye, and was being nursed back to health by a local farmer.
I seriously doubt children have any significant impact on wild bird populations. I haven't known too many children who are good enough to build a trap for any sort of animal.
Oh, I wouldn't argue that BSG, ST, SW, SG or any other acronymized science fiction is scientifically accurate, hinted to by the "fiction" part of it.
Rather than arguing cylon evolution vs innovation, I had bigger problems with BSG. The first being their FTL "jump". There was one episode towards the end of the new series where they did a jump to destroy something (I can't remember what right now). This was disregarded several other times, including jumping Galactica in the atmosphere, and jumping a raptor out of the interior of Galactica. Well, and right at the end jumping Galactica out of the side of the Cylon ship.
If the drive changed the velocity of a craft from it's current speed to faster than light (per the FTL acronym), it would destroy the occupants and probably the ship due to the change in velocity (how many G is a 1 second 0 to 671M mph?). I know, suspension of disbelief, inertial dampeners, etc, etc.. But that doesn't explain how a solid object can pass through another solid object (like the side of Galactica, or a planet). So if "FTL" isn't actually acceleration to speed, but stepping into an alternative plane of existence, when the object were to do it, the void left behind would immediately collapse. Think of the air gap left by a lightning bolt, an incomprehensible size larger and more defined (like the size of a ship in the atmosphere). It may as well have been a nuke going off at a couple thousand feet. It wouldn't have been a simple "woomp" and a light breeze on the ground.... and the use of relatively modern vehicles and other props (funny cut papers aside). It's a culture that evolved completely separately from modern humanity. There's no way in hell it would be anything like that. Shift 100 years either way from today, and that technology would be amazingly advanced or pathetically antiquated. Well, unless you're a big fan of wood spoke wheels and a top speed less than 45 mph.
It was pretty clearly spelled out, there was a significant period between the Caprica timeline and the BSG timeline. During that period, anything could have happened. Well, obviously we know the two endpoints. Looking for a missing link in an imaginary universe is just silly.
The evolutionary chain would seem clear. The metal cylons evolved as warriors for their brute strength and combat abilities. The human form cylons evolved as the learned "race", trying to become more like "God", their creator, who was man.
There were hints of the intermediary steps. Consider the raider that Starbuck flew back to Galactica. That wasn't a metal machine. That was a grown fleshy nasty mess.
Also consider, the human form is just a machine. It has electromechanical systems that continue it's existence. We are at a primitive stage of understanding how some of these systems work. If the evolution of them was not bound by biological and environmental concerns, but guided with a distinct goal (to be like "God"), and have a target template ready, that evolution would be much different. If humanity put 40 years of nonstop work by the majority of the citizens who were all as knowledgeable as the smartest person ever, evolution would go faster. Unfortunately, our social and political "rules" limit the idea of biological engineering of the human race. If we didn't, imagine what we could have accomplished by now. I doubt humanity will ever see its golden age of biological engineering as far as humanity goes, because we like to believe we are anything more than just a machine with that extra spark that we call life. Economic concerns limit us also. The smartest people in the world aren't working on advancing sciences. They do whatever they can to survive, or sometimes they thrive, but it's rarely in any scientific field. There were more dot com millionaires than there will be scientific millionaires in this century. People go where the money is, because that's what we've made of our culture, and sadly it will continue to limit our futures for a long time.
I think it would be appropriate. Each subsequent generation corrected faults found in previous generations, for future generations. More of, favorable traits were maintained, and unfavorable traits were discarded.
Actually, go to about:config in Firefox, and put in "http" as your filter criteria. It can (and does) send information off-site. Try changing the filter criteria to "safe", and see what it comes up with. It should be a more discrete list places that every request is sent to, like "http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/report?".
I'm not paranoid. If you're going to information so private that no one should know it, you shouldn't be playing on the Internet.
I was working on a project once, where it was a stand alone machine (like an kiosk with no Internet connection), and we built a browser based application for it. It saved a lot of hassle of making a custom GUI, managing graphics, layout, etc, etc. It also made it easy to hand off to another developer, who would only need to know how to make a web page.:) Without an internet connection, it suffered a speed decrease, because it was trying to resolve and then request things like the safebrowsing URLs. I believe there were about 25 entries to remove to get rid of all functionality like that. Other pesky ones were ones like the automatic update checks (we disabled them). It became very speedy on very slow hardware.
But, these are just the ones that we can easily find. Is there such a resource for MSIE or Chrome? I know Chrome has a very primitive configuration interface by design, so we have to trust that Google is following the "do no evil" motto. I trust Microsoft will not only record and send the info somehow, but they'll deny it to the end.
I'm pretty sure it was more like a tasteless odorless chunk of chum was thrown into the ocean, and there was no reaction. There was no interest at all.
More importantly, it hasn't even been released yet. It is available as a beta, but you have to implicitly install it.
And the general reaction is "what the fuck?"? I'm not really sure what I just saw, but I think it was a mixture of CGI animals edging on pornography, and a mid 50's Carmen Miranda musical.
It may have had something to do with orange juice.
one California proposition -- which would legalize marijuana.
If California maintains their legalization of marijuana, it likely will extend to other states in subsequent years.
It's not that I care from a personal standpoint. I don't smoke marijuana. I have no intention of smoking marijuana. From life experience, I see no reason that it shouldn't be legal. I also don't drink tequila. I have no intention to drink tequila. It's legal though. Would I suggest outlawing tequila because I won't drink it? No.
I did find it interesting that some alcohols are illegal in California, that are available in a variety of other states. But unlike some other states, strong alcohols are sold in regular stores right along with beer and wine.
or were absorbed into human social groups. Presence of Neanderthal DNA in modern Europeans and Asians seems to lend credence to the absorption theory.
Exactly. Which way that absorption went will remain a mystery, unless we develop time travel.
If the stronger neanderthal men (men said as a general term, not a gender) captured significant numbers of cro-magnon men as slaves, farmers, or even just capturing the more attractive women to use for their own purposes, they could have thinned out their blood lines inadvertently.
Neanderthal were considered stronger, stouter, and smarter (based on brain cavity size). In the animal kingdom, where both groups would have applied at the time (except for tool use by the neanderthal), the stronger tend to conquer the weak for things they want. If there was a tendency towards capturing the seemingly more attractive cro-magnon women as mates, the change would have happened fairly rapidly, over several generations. That's not to say that this is the way it played out, but it seems more reasonable than neanderthal man dying out due to food restrictions, where the cro-magnon man survived. The stronger, smart people would have simply taken anything they needed from the nearby weaker species, and wouldn't have even grunted "thank you." The women may have chosen to mate with the neanderthal male because he could provide better protection in the prehistoric harsh world.
This may still be in play. We idolize thin attractive women, who are more likely to mate with the stronger male, with disregard to intelligence. We see this mating ritual starting in grade school, where the jocks get the cheerleaders, and will beat up anyone weaker to attain their goal. For many women, this show of strength is very attractive.
Think, big strong man protecting his fragile beautiful mate.
We like to think we've evolved, but in reality we haven't evolved much, other than adding new variables (fast cars, expensive houses, lavishing a prospective mate with gifts). The only real difference is that the gene pool has diminished, so the strong smart neanderthal man is now part of an almost identical gene pool to the weaker cro-magnon man.
Don't try to explain this to that girl who you'd like to date. She's interested in the jock, for subconscious genetic reasons. No amount of logic will correct it.
Well, they did survive, obviously. It was only crappy selective breeding over the following centuries that made the neanderthal genes less dominant. Damned the invention of agriculture and the idea of cities and civilization.
At least we know live DNA still exists, so it could be possible through selective breeding, to resurrect the species. We've theorized it could be done for woolly mammoths, why not with viable DNA. It's quite likely that there are some folks with a larger percentage of the DNA.
Now that brings up another question. Would those with trace or significant percentages of neanderthal DNA be considered any more or less human? We only just came out of that recently (in the span of human civilization), where most of us recognize that a human is still human, regardless of nation of origin, skin and hair coloration, or gender.
For the historical value, I'd love to know. For the future possibilities, I wouldn't ever want such testing done. Since we don't know who's on which side, you don't know who the leading species would be.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone knows that the KGB had hot russian chicks as their spies. Haven't you ever watched a James Bond movie? :)
Well, it's shown in reality too. Some are: Anna Chapman, Anna Fermanova, Patricia Mills, Krystyna Skarbek, Josephine Baker, and Violette Szabo. They don't exactly resemble the Bond girls though. I'm still trying to figure out how to convince a hot russian spy chick that I have secrets worth seducing. It's not that I'd give them up, but the seduction is always fun. :)
Oh, I definitely know the difference between the dramatizations of explosions, and the actual fact. I used to play amateur pyromaniac, which is now reserved for the 4th of July and New Years Eve. :)
A big fire is still a threat though. I'll use an extreme case as an example.
Several years ago (probably close to 10 years) at about 4am was a gas tanker truck driving along on a wide road (4 lanes, limited access). The left exit lane was well marked that there was a sharp turn ahead, and the indicated speed was 25mph. The other three lanes continued straight head at 55mph. Most of the traffic on that part of the road continues on to a freeway, so they're typically driving 65mph to 70mph.
The trucker was apparently tired, and misjudged the turn. Well, he realized what he was about to do just as he got to the turn. He managed to get the truck turned, but it rolled over in the underpass.
Hollywood would have filmed this as a huge explosion, bridge pieces falling for miles, etc, etc. Instead, the driver came to, climbed out of the truck which was now burning, and ran for safety. It was a very hot nasty fire, and it did melt the concrete and steel in the overpass. Us locals weren't very happy that one of the major freeways was closed for about a year while they rebuilt the bridge.
So, wearing a 5 gallon gas can with a 1Kw generator isn't necessarily dangerous. Parts can go flying (ask mechanics about throwing a rod through the block, and they'll have some stories to tell, and sometimes parts). 5 gallons of burning gasoline isn't exactly going to be a comfortable place to be. It's not going to be like setting off a pound of C4 in your backpack, but it can kill you, especially if you can't get out of the rig that you're tied to.
I wouldn't be that surprised to see propane fueled generator used. I didn't see an indication of how much power is needed, but capacitors/batteries for surge capacity (lifting something heavy), and a small generator to keep nominal power supplied would seem easy enough.
One of the things I've been doing lately is repairing small generators (4-6kw). A friend of mine has a tiny 1kw gas generator. Converting over to propane isn't all that hard. The same conversion from gasoline to propane could be used for hydrogen. With any of the fuels or lithium ion batteries, there is an explosion risk. If the soldier wearing it gets shot wearing this armor (assuming they cover those gaping holes) gets shot in the armor, he may live. If the same shot caused an explosion in the fuel supply, that's not so good. Then again, if it's deployed in a war zone, getting shot wearing some armor is preferable to getting shot wearing no armor.
A quad band GSM phone should work just about anywhere. I've known some people who travel around the world a good bit, and they have service just about everywhere. One person I knew from Europe continued to use his GSM phone here in the US. The phone showed the provider name, and it would switch the displayed carrier name when he arrived in the US, and it continued to work. Unfortunately, quad band GSM phones are not exactly normal in the US.
I use Boost Mobile now (cheapest rates for prepaid unlimited). Even they use two different services. Their low end phones are iDen. Some of their better phones (like the Blackberry) use CDMA. I have no expectation that it would work in other countries. A while back, I had a Verizon CDMA phone. It worked in the US and parts of Canada. In Mexico (near the US border) I sometimes had voice service, but most of the time the voice service didn't work, but text messaging still did work.
Eventually, I intend to buy a multi-sim quad band phone from eBay, and use the sim of the day in it.
I seriously doubt that would happen. You and I are end consumers. We each count for one phone each (usually). The cell provider is the big customer. They buy in bulk of tens of thousands. It's pretty clear who has the leverage. It's in the best interest of the cell phone provider to have the phones locked to their company. That's why the US providers haven't migrated to the defacto international standard GSM. They don't want people buying their subsidized phone, and then jumping ship when it's obvious the customer will jump ship to the better provider who charges more for the phone itself.
I think we have a winner!
Anything more, and the SEC will look into why a publicly traded company spent an unusually high amount on a worthless asset.
Well, that kind of sucks, doesn't it? Both my real name and online alias match a whole lot of people. There are regular folks, and some well respected folks (doctors, scientists, and talented artists). Even cities that I've lived in had multiple people with my names. With a common name, I'm less likely to get the random stalker or other undesirables. I've known people with more unique names, and a few misplaced words online will get the undesirables crawling out of the woodwork.
But, it's optimizing the HTML, not changing the content of your message. In the context of a phone call, it would be like if they took your analog phone signal (like, from the handset), compressed it and then transmitted it in a form that the other side could understand. The end result remains the same.
Oh, that already happens.
There are plenty of telco's that switch you from analog to digital to send down the wire, just to convert on the other side. How many calls can you send down a T1? There are 25 analog channels. Depending on the encoding and compression, you can get 125+ calls down the same wire. You may not know it's there, but it is. If the telco can shove 5x the number of calls down the same wire, with a bit of hardware investment, they can (and have) do it.
Back to the actual issue, automatic optimization of the html. Do you complain when whatever hosting company you're using does gzip compression on your outbound data? I didn't think so. This is a CDN, their job is to take your data, distribute it to their edge nodes, and get it to the customer as quickly as possible. That's exactly why you'd go with a CDN. I did a bit of this on my own, with my dynamically generated pages. I actually turn it on and off on occasion. The cleaned pages render faster, but it's harder to find bugs in the code. On the other hand, even though the site is dynamic, I don't go around mucking about in the HTML parts of the code very often.
So, with that argument busted, what was your next one?
Most of the world shifted from being hunter-gatherers (with some exceptions) to agrarian systems an awful long time ago. For most civilized countries, hunting became a sport, not a means of survival. For the most part, we survive on domesticated animals and farm raised plants, which are purchased in local stores. There are exceptions, but those are few and far between, and even then, you probably wouldn't be posting to Slashdot if you were there.
Don't try to fool yourself, only a very small percentage of those living in modern society could live without our modern infrastructure. Ask your average city dweller to catch a pigeon.
A lot of people really don't understand that. They probably have cheap hosting accounts, and have never needed to deal with actual circuits.
I've worked at places with multiple GigE circuits. Besides the base cost in the datacenter (floor space, power, port charges, etc), we had negotiated contracts on bandwidth. 95th percentile is that bastard of a number that we deal with all the time. For those that don't know, it goes something like this. The uplink provider monitors our ports once every 5 minutes. At the end of the month, they take all the samples, sort them by utilization, and knock off the top 5%. Whatever that next number is, is what we pay. There are dedicated rates too. If you don't use the line, that doesn't matter, you're paying at lest a minimum fixed amount, which could be something like 20% of the line capacity. So an idle datacenter with nothing in it, but it has a GigE circuit could cost as if we were using 200Mb/s at 95th percentile.
For our bills, it was easily over $100,000/mo. That's a conservative number, but I haven't been there in a while, and don't remember how high it really went. Do you want fancier services, like multiple circuits into your space, BGP routing, etc? Oh, the price goes way up. When you get big enough, and want to get your data to the customers faster, you start doing private peerings, and putting out edge nodes (servers closer to the clients, like Akamai provides), or even putting dedicated servers in on the end user networks. They don't like paying huge bandwidth and peering bills, when they can deploy $100k worth of equipment two hops from the customer.
If NetFlix is sucking up so much bandwidth, someone's making a fortune on it already. So it accounts for 20%, big deal, that doesn't indicate the total utilization of the available, or even where it was measured. I played this game once. I took the total bandwidth my company used during peak hours, and compared it to the Mae East bandwidth graphs (when they were public). Our bandwidth used 15% of what Mae East passed. And guess what. It didn't destroy the world. We weren't even responsible for 15% of what passed through Mae East, because various peerings meant our traffic went in all kinds of different directions.
By that standard, NetFlix could use 200% of what passes through Mae East (plural now), and even that wouldn't mean anything other than bragging rights. Sure, it's a lot of bandwidth, but it doesn't indicate saturation of available resources, nor the end of anything at all.
And exactly how are they catching wild owls? Have you ever tried to catch a wild bird? The closest I've ever gotten to a wild owl was probably 30 feet. Well, with one exception, but it had a broken wing, was blind in one eye, and was being nursed back to health by a local farmer.
I seriously doubt children have any significant impact on wild bird populations. I haven't known too many children who are good enough to build a trap for any sort of animal.
Oh, I wouldn't argue that BSG, ST, SW, SG or any other acronymized science fiction is scientifically accurate, hinted to by the "fiction" part of it.
Rather than arguing cylon evolution vs innovation, I had bigger problems with BSG. The first being their FTL "jump". There was one episode towards the end of the new series where they did a jump to destroy something (I can't remember what right now). This was disregarded several other times, including jumping Galactica in the atmosphere, and jumping a raptor out of the interior of Galactica. Well, and right at the end jumping Galactica out of the side of the Cylon ship.
If the drive changed the velocity of a craft from it's current speed to faster than light (per the FTL acronym), it would destroy the occupants and probably the ship due to the change in velocity (how many G is a 1 second 0 to 671M mph?). I know, suspension of disbelief, inertial dampeners, etc, etc.. But that doesn't explain how a solid object can pass through another solid object (like the side of Galactica, or a planet). So if "FTL" isn't actually acceleration to speed, but stepping into an alternative plane of existence, when the object were to do it, the void left behind would immediately collapse. Think of the air gap left by a lightning bolt, an incomprehensible size larger and more defined (like the size of a ship in the atmosphere). It may as well have been a nuke going off at a couple thousand feet. It wouldn't have been a simple "woomp" and a light breeze on the ground. ... and the use of relatively modern vehicles and other props (funny cut papers aside). It's a culture that evolved completely separately from modern humanity. There's no way in hell it would be anything like that. Shift 100 years either way from today, and that technology would be amazingly advanced or pathetically antiquated. Well, unless you're a big fan of wood spoke wheels and a top speed less than 45 mph.
It was pretty clearly spelled out, there was a significant period between the Caprica timeline and the BSG timeline. During that period, anything could have happened. Well, obviously we know the two endpoints. Looking for a missing link in an imaginary universe is just silly.
The evolutionary chain would seem clear. The metal cylons evolved as warriors for their brute strength and combat abilities. The human form cylons evolved as the learned "race", trying to become more like "God", their creator, who was man.
There were hints of the intermediary steps. Consider the raider that Starbuck flew back to Galactica. That wasn't a metal machine. That was a grown fleshy nasty mess.
Also consider, the human form is just a machine. It has electromechanical systems that continue it's existence. We are at a primitive stage of understanding how some of these systems work. If the evolution of them was not bound by biological and environmental concerns, but guided with a distinct goal (to be like "God"), and have a target template ready, that evolution would be much different. If humanity put 40 years of nonstop work by the majority of the citizens who were all as knowledgeable as the smartest person ever, evolution would go faster. Unfortunately, our social and political "rules" limit the idea of biological engineering of the human race. If we didn't, imagine what we could have accomplished by now. I doubt humanity will ever see its golden age of biological engineering as far as humanity goes, because we like to believe we are anything more than just a machine with that extra spark that we call life. Economic concerns limit us also. The smartest people in the world aren't working on advancing sciences. They do whatever they can to survive, or sometimes they thrive, but it's rarely in any scientific field. There were more dot com millionaires than there will be scientific millionaires in this century. People go where the money is, because that's what we've made of our culture, and sadly it will continue to limit our futures for a long time.
I think it would be appropriate. Each subsequent generation corrected faults found in previous generations, for future generations. More of, favorable traits were maintained, and unfavorable traits were discarded.
Or the appropriate definitions
The trains don't and up at the expected destinations?
I wonder how they translate pounding your head on the keyboard. Probably as full acceptance of any of their decisions.
Actually, go to about:config in Firefox, and put in "http" as your filter criteria. It can (and does) send information off-site. Try changing the filter criteria to "safe", and see what it comes up with. It should be a more discrete list places that every request is sent to, like "http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/report?".
I'm not paranoid. If you're going to information so private that no one should know it, you shouldn't be playing on the Internet.
I was working on a project once, where it was a stand alone machine (like an kiosk with no Internet connection), and we built a browser based application for it. It saved a lot of hassle of making a custom GUI, managing graphics, layout, etc, etc. It also made it easy to hand off to another developer, who would only need to know how to make a web page. :) Without an internet connection, it suffered a speed decrease, because it was trying to resolve and then request things like the safebrowsing URLs. I believe there were about 25 entries to remove to get rid of all functionality like that. Other pesky ones were ones like the automatic update checks (we disabled them). It became very speedy on very slow hardware.
But, these are just the ones that we can easily find. Is there such a resource for MSIE or Chrome? I know Chrome has a very primitive configuration interface by design, so we have to trust that Google is following the "do no evil" motto. I trust Microsoft will not only record and send the info somehow, but they'll deny it to the end.
Very good, prior art to my prior art. Pytheas would be proud, and Erik the Red would kill us both for not recognizing him. :)
I'm pretty sure it was more like a tasteless odorless chunk of chum was thrown into the ocean, and there was no reaction. There was no interest at all.
More importantly, it hasn't even been released yet. It is available as a beta, but you have to implicitly install it.
First, go to Google, and search for msie 9
The first link takes you the Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive
Which the download button doesn't download, but takes you to the Explorer9Beta page
(Does Ford know that they've hijacked the "Explorer" name?)
The download button does actually download.
And no, I'm not a fanboy. I was just curious. Don't ask about performance though, all I got to was the download page. I didn't actually install it. :)
And the general reaction is "what the fuck?"? I'm not really sure what I just saw, but I think it was a mixture of CGI animals edging on pornography, and a mid 50's Carmen Miranda musical.
It may have had something to do with orange juice.
I totally agree with you.
I have my own segregation of alcohols, but it doesn't exactly follow what some states user as their guidelines for sales licensing.
No but it may show a marked increase in munchies purchases, and in-home theft of said munchies. :)
It's explained in the summary...
If California maintains their legalization of marijuana, it likely will extend to other states in subsequent years.
It's not that I care from a personal standpoint. I don't smoke marijuana. I have no intention of smoking marijuana. From life experience, I see no reason that it shouldn't be legal. I also don't drink tequila. I have no intention to drink tequila. It's legal though. Would I suggest outlawing tequila because I won't drink it? No.
I did find it interesting that some alcohols are illegal in California, that are available in a variety of other states. But unlike some other states, strong alcohols are sold in regular stores right along with beer and wine.
Exactly. Which way that absorption went will remain a mystery, unless we develop time travel.
If the stronger neanderthal men (men said as a general term, not a gender) captured significant numbers of cro-magnon men as slaves, farmers, or even just capturing the more attractive women to use for their own purposes, they could have thinned out their blood lines inadvertently.
Neanderthal were considered stronger, stouter, and smarter (based on brain cavity size). In the animal kingdom, where both groups would have applied at the time (except for tool use by the neanderthal), the stronger tend to conquer the weak for things they want. If there was a tendency towards capturing the seemingly more attractive cro-magnon women as mates, the change would have happened fairly rapidly, over several generations. That's not to say that this is the way it played out, but it seems more reasonable than neanderthal man dying out due to food restrictions, where the cro-magnon man survived. The stronger, smart people would have simply taken anything they needed from the nearby weaker species, and wouldn't have even grunted "thank you." The women may have chosen to mate with the neanderthal male because he could provide better protection in the prehistoric harsh world.
This may still be in play. We idolize thin attractive women, who are more likely to mate with the stronger male, with disregard to intelligence. We see this mating ritual starting in grade school, where the jocks get the cheerleaders, and will beat up anyone weaker to attain their goal. For many women, this show of strength is very attractive.
Think, big strong man protecting his fragile beautiful mate.
We like to think we've evolved, but in reality we haven't evolved much, other than adding new variables (fast cars, expensive houses, lavishing a prospective mate with gifts). The only real difference is that the gene pool has diminished, so the strong smart neanderthal man is now part of an almost identical gene pool to the weaker cro-magnon man.
Don't try to explain this to that girl who you'd like to date. She's interested in the jock, for subconscious genetic reasons. No amount of logic will correct it.
Well, they did survive, obviously. It was only crappy selective breeding over the following centuries that made the neanderthal genes less dominant. Damned the invention of agriculture and the idea of cities and civilization.
At least we know live DNA still exists, so it could be possible through selective breeding, to resurrect the species. We've theorized it could be done for woolly mammoths, why not with viable DNA. It's quite likely that there are some folks with a larger percentage of the DNA.
Now that brings up another question. Would those with trace or significant percentages of neanderthal DNA be considered any more or less human? We only just came out of that recently (in the span of human civilization), where most of us recognize that a human is still human, regardless of nation of origin, skin and hair coloration, or gender.
For the historical value, I'd love to know. For the future possibilities, I wouldn't ever want such testing done. Since we don't know who's on which side, you don't know who the leading species would be.