Well, you don't want to destroy item [5] of a pointer array, when you really meant to destroy item [-5] of a pointer array (ie, item fifth from the end.) I assume that's the kind of corruption that they refer to...
OK, what's with Sluggy Freelance and Baen???
on
War of Honor
·
· Score: 2
I just went to thefifthimperium.com, and there I see an excerpt from Sluggy Freelance. After reading When the Devil Dances, I had to find out who "Bun-Bun" was, and I spent a couple of weeks catching up on the online comic (folks, stick with it for the first 2 years, it's worth it for the backstory when you get to the good stuff.) So I see Bun-Bun on the Baen site, the comic gets a lot of press in John Ringo's book, and now I see some of it at David Weber's website. Is there some hidden cosmic connection that links them all?
Re:Amazon have the CD?
on
War of Honor
·
· Score: 2
Note - the book club edition has the same cover art (the one that touts the CD inside), but I don't believe that it has the CD inside it. Can anyone confirm this one way or another?
Some more good stuff that is included on the CD (at least, on the CD I got...):
John Ringo's Posleen series (Hymn before Battle, Gust Front, When the Devil Dances). The bad thing about the CD was I couldn't stop reading - I went through two books a day until I polished off the Honor Harrington books - and that's a lot of books (about 350-500k per, compressed!) The other bad thing is once you've finished them off, you're left waiting until John Ringo and David Weber put out the next installments in their respective series. In the case of When the Devil Dances, that's one hell of a cliff-hanger he's got...
It's an interesting experiment. If the goal was to introduce new readers to stable authors, and to get them used to reading webscription type books, then I think they've succeeded. Those are two series I wouldn't mind adding as hardcovers to my library, and I am much more receptive to getting them as webscription editions for my laptop or for my palmpilot.
After being a rabid spam-fighter for years, I finally had to retire - manually taking out spammers was eating up too much of my time. I spent a week setting up Spamassassin, procmail, spamcop, and a few other procmail based filters, to create a universal filtering solution for all my mail. After I set it all up, it worked great, 99.99% of spam to that address was taken care of
Fast forward a few months later to the present. Now all my e-mail addresses (academic, etc.) have some form of filtering on them, mostly spamassassin based. Unfortunately, the spammers seem to be learning, as more and more crap gets through. Very low key spam - a paragraph and a URL, no caps, no trigger words, no malformed headers, but extremely annoying.
At that point, what do you do? Don't get me wrong - without spamassassin, I'd be drowning in over 60 pieces of spam per day, but I can forsee the day when spamassassin has effectively been neutered in the spam vs. anti-spam arms race. I guess when that happens, I'll have to switch to whitelisting and challenge/response to authenticate new senders... Or, we could do the smart thing now and outlaw spammers before we let e-mail suffer the same fate as usenet. Besides, ignoring spammers isn't as much fun as subjecting them to the tortuous hell of the American legal system.
In the US, land is cheap (land outside of major developed areas, that is.) Laws and taxes are such that building housing developments, and selling the idea of owning your own home is quite profitable, environmental impact be damned. As a result, sprawling residential developments spring up all over the place, overloading existing infrastructure (power, roads, telecommunications, sewer, water, hospital/school/police/fire.)
As more and more people move out into the boonies (and enduring 1-2hr commute times to and back from work), they demand improvements, like highway widening, more roads, etc. The growing tax base, and larger residential population now justify development of commercial properties, such as shopping malls - and guess who owns the land? Yep, the original developers, or attached arms thereof. Soon the area incorporates, and the politicans of that burblet start clamoring for state and federal funds to fix the mess that the developers created.
In the meantime, everyone who lives between the newly spawned burblet and where most of the residents work has to share increased commute times due to vehicle congestion, and greater pollution. Mass transit using buses fails miserably in this kind of situation, as buses have to share the roads with the worsening traffic, trapping mass transit riders in a commuter's nightmare. Solutions using rail, be it subway, commuter light rail, or a monorail/peoplemover, where the mass transit solution has right of way, are far superior, as you can cut commute times in half and thereby offer a reasonable and useful alternative to driving your own car.
Realistically though, unless all the burblets are in a straight line, leading to the commercial/industrial section of the city (hehe, simcity - a great urban planning tool), retrofitting any area with rail transit is an expensive and questionable pursuit. The key thing is right of way - and high density development around that right of way. Current development is low density, and unless you want to force people to rezone the properties along the proposed rail line, there won't be enough people riding mass transit to make it viable for the short to mid-term. In the long term, the idea is that having a rail line will convince people to re-orient their lives around it - but without a critical mass of transit options (a train that goes 3 miles is not useful), nobody's gonna ride it.
Huh? Their "fuel" is hydrogen peroxide, which converts to steam when it hits the catalyzing screens just prior to the engine nozzles. The screens should be plenty hot when they hit higher altitudes, and a pressure sphere will increase in performance (up to a point) as the the outer atmospheric pressure decreases. I really don't see how a turbopump comes into the equation, as you don't have separate fuel/oxidizers to combine and ignite.
The nice thing about spamassassin is that you can implement rules to derive scoring from third party services (ie, SPEWS, SpamCop, etc.) as part of the overall scoring procedure. The feedback loop is much longer, but via third parties, you can train the final output to exclude known spammers once you've reported them. Not as nifty as a local learning system, but I get a much broader exposure, and hopefully, and more accurate weighting via the reports of other users.
Aren't ricochet wireless modems serial-communicable radio modems? You can get the older ones for fairly cheap, and the newer ones for probably about $30-40 a piece. Older ones being preferable in areas where Ricochet has been reactivated, due to issues with them deliberately crippling your point-to-point connectivity with the newer modems.
The instant they put up an orbital weapons platform capable of negating US nuclear superiority. Of course, when that event occurs, we'll be screwed beyond all hope of rescue (unless we have big frickin "lasers" by then that actually work on ballistic missiles...)
I wholeheartedly agree. The Russians have plenty of space hardware available for cheap - but you have to understand, that NASA is really all about politics right now. If the congresscritters don't get their pork-barrel allocation out of the NASA budget, they get cranky, and start stamping their feet. If I were in charge of NASA, the first thing I'd do is negotiate a bulk purchase of rockets, and needed consultants. The private sector has the right idea - they use Russian tech to launch comsats into space, and we use Russian tech to launch the resupply missions to the ISS (ie the escape pod.) Thanks for the link on the big boosters. It's a shame to let that kind of heavy lift capability lie fallow [Energia boosters]:
Payload from Baikonur
95-100 tons to 51-degree LEO
18 tons to geostationary orbit
32 tons to the lunar transfer
28 tons to Venus and Mars
We feared the Soviets. Their launching of the first artificial satellite scared the shit out of the American populace, and further enhanced the boogeyman image of the Soviets, pulling ahead of us in terms of military might, scientific knowledge, "superior society", and expansion via sympathetic regimes/revolution. Our increase in engineers and scientists can be traced to the increased emphasis on science and engineering to "beat the Soviets." Now that the Soviet threat is gone, people are happy being stupid.
China is a different story. Most people here in the US really don't take them seriously as a threat. Hell we buy most of our goods from them, and that trend will only increase, given the low labor costs and the high amounts of foreign investment in China. Unless China does something stupid, like try and conquer Korea and Taiwan, nobody here will consider them a threat worth competing with. Ergo, if they get to the moon, we'll just yawn, and continue ceeding the future of mankind to them.
Question is, even if we wanted to put the Saturn V back into operation, do we have the institutional know-how to do it? I expect most of the engineers from the original program have long been retired, or (in case of some of the older ones) probably deceased. Sure we may have the plans, but without people who know what the hell they're doing, you can be there WILL be catestrophic failures... which will be VERY ugly with a 100 ton payload. Jeez, do we even have any contractors who are qualified to build the beast? What about subcontractors???
Too bad we're not spending more on space exploration (exploitation) - it'd be a great way to employ a lot of very skilled workers, instead of letting them disperse to designing webpages, or teaching basic high school math as probationary teachers...
Launch Homer Simpson into Space!
on
Redirecting NASA
·
· Score: 2
Isn't the problem with space (and science more generally) that "the people" just don't care about it, but rather like watching spectacles and human drama (the chalenger crash, Apollo 13).
So we just have to hold a contest, like survivor, to select an "average joe" and launch their ass into space, with plenty of publicity and press coverage. We can also feed the public a lot of bullshit about setting up bases on the moon, mining asteroids, and replacing the shuttle, which should hopefully jar some pennies loose from the appropriations commitee so we can do one of the three for real...
Just make sure we send up an inanimate carbon rod with this guy just in case things go wrong...
The shuttle fleet is made up of damn prototypes. That's all they are - they were never meant to operate as a long term fleet, but were meant instead to serve as a testbed for the next generation of orbital lift vehicles, which would build upon the lessons of the shuttle, and maximize operating efficiency. As as a consequence, we end up rebuilding the damn things after every launch, none of the shuttles are completely standardized with any of the other shuttles, and we have no cargo-only module (meaning we waste payload space on crew and required life support/recovery equipment.) Oh, and by the way, did I mention how goddamn expensive it is to recover and rebuild all the damn components?
Right now, they're re-welding the hydrogen feed lines, and a recent launch was scrubbed because they were leaking oxygen, despite having inspected the feed lines. I'd rather we move to using Russian spacecraft if we want to go back to big dumb boosters. Unfortunately, it looks like the "new" NASA budget will be pork-barreled to death to preserve congressional influence in funding current programs (shuttle, space station, token amount to new lift capability so they can claim research into new technologies.) The sad consequence of this is that the Chinese will probably have better heavy lift capability than we do before the end of the decade is out, despite having a 30 year disadvantage, and restrictions on US technology transfers...
And I mean REALLY bad movies. Movies so bad, they never made it to the theatre, despite their multi-million dollar price tag. Movies that went straight to video instead...
I guess it boils down to concept/script, and execution/production. If the concept sucks, it doesn't matter how nice looking it is, and if the execution falls through, it isn't worth even trying.
Lesson: producers are eternal optimists (and damn bandits to boot.) Before the hyped-up, money laden days of the dot comers, movie producers (and game producers by extension) had the shady accounting, super hype, sell the idea (instead of the product), raise and spend some else's money thing down pat. That they rise and fall on almost a daily basis shouldn't surprise anyone.
Finger was great when everyone with an account was a shell user at an academic or corporate research facility. You could check office hours, get someone's extension so you could call them, check to see if they had come in today. Soon after spammers started abusing every RFC on the books, and security became an issue due to the continuing hordes of wanna-be hackers, Finger disappeared.
Maybe you could get people to re-establish a limited directory service, but there are a lot of downsides to giving spammers a tool to check whether your e-mail address is legit or not. Even worse, I'm sure those database miners would have a field day tying your phone/address/e-mail/name to the records they can get from county, state records (think property taxes), and the credit bureaus. I had a tough enough time convincing the shitheads at Lohemanns that I was not a customer of theirs, and the crap they sent to me over a 6 month period was pure aggravation - even worse was the idea that they bought a bad database merge that happened to tie my e-mail address to that customer's name.
Of the 6 gas stations in my area, none of them sell diesel.
As mentioned in previous posts, US diesel fuel is pretty dirty stuff - you need only need to take a look at metropolitian buses to see that.
For the US, perhaps not Europe, hybrids are the best solution to an emissions, not an efficiency problem. Sure, we'd love to increase fuel economy here in the states, but given that gas is $1.59 in most places, we're not hurting if our cars don't break 50mpg either. Where we do have serious problems is in the sheer number of cars in traffic - if we can kill emissions while people are doing the hour-long stop'n'go to and from work, that's a lot of fuel that stays in the car, rather than getting thrown into the local airstream.
Ethanol production from crops is also currently subsidized by the federal government. Hopefully, if they decide to incorporate ethanol into the nation fuel stocks as a replacement additive, there will be efficiences in volume, but you can bet that the farming states will hang on to subsidies for as long as they possibly can.
If you mean the RAV4 EV, that's not a hybrid - that's a pure electric vehicle. It also retails for 40k (not counting the discounts and incentives from state and federal govts.), and is sold pretty much only in California. Of course, you go get HOV access, you can charge it all over the play for free (lots of unused charging stations here in SoCal) and it is a SUV, but the question is, would you foot a 40k bill for a battery pack insured for only 5 years?
Of course, if they do have a hybrid RAV4 - let me know!
there are bound to be losses associated with taking electricity to produce hydrogen and oxygen for a fuel cell.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to just take the electricity to power the car itself instead?
Depends on the energy density of the storage medium. Converting electric power to hydrogen, then using a fuel cell to convert it back to electricity, is the same thing as charging a battery (and converting electricity to whatever chemical state the battery uses to store power) and then tapping the battery later to get that electricity back. Both involve losses, but depending on energy density and charging losses, hydrogen is theoretically a better choice because you can generate your hydrogen somewhere else, and continuously refuel your fuel cell (with maybe a 5 min stop at the liquid hydrogen refuling station) With batteries, you'd have to swap out or recharge your current set in order to top-off the energy capacity of your car.
Now, whether that actually proves true in practice really depends on how advanced the infrastructure is when they start deploying fuel-cell vehicles.
OMG. I just took a look at a still from the show. Damn - how the hell did they manage to twist the Stargate property into that?!?!? And what is up with those character designs?
http://www.gateworld.net/infinity/index.shtml
A quote from the page:
The writers and producers of SG-1 and future live-action Stargate projects are not involved in Infinity. According to SG-1 co-creator Brad Wright, the animated series should not be considered official Stargate canon.
I should hope not!!!
Just so people know, these 4 are supposed to be Air Force cadets...
Every episode has some hit-you-over-the-head moral. (Does that make it count towards some FCC-mandated children's programming with morals quota?)
Yes. Actually it does. If you look at the writer's bible for many animated shows, there's a studio-inserted bit about contributing a positive moral message, which is a direct result of FCC education requirements.
If you write an episode for SG-Infinity, you'd better make sure nobody dies, and the good guys do good things. Kind of limits what you can do, but hey, constraints are supposed to be good for the creative juices, right?
Lets say it together "Saturday Morning CARTOON" other than a lot of kids not getting the better writing so easily, most of them do. Writers just don't get it....
Actually, many writers do "get it", but what you write has to get approved by the story editor and the director. Ever seen an episode where the writer was an idiot and failed to provide a reason for some special item, or had them do something, but never followed through in the payoff? You can bet someone cut pages from the script, and of course, when they cut, they ALWAYS manage to cut the pivotal story points... And, again, for "children's shows", your writing is subject to the scrutiny of the network censors (aka, television standards and practices), which limits the kinds of things you can put the characters through, not to mention again, the requirement that your story have some sort of moral point.
BTW, has anyone managed to figure out how Enterprise has managed to stay in such nice shape, without resupply or docking facilities? I would have dirtied up the ship a bit more for the show, after all, it has been a year since it started it's mission...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you don't want to destroy item [5] of a pointer array, when you really meant to destroy item [-5] of a pointer array (ie, item fifth from the end.) I assume that's the kind of corruption that they refer to...
I just went to thefifthimperium.com, and there I see an excerpt from Sluggy Freelance. After reading When the Devil Dances, I had to find out who "Bun-Bun" was, and I spent a couple of weeks catching up on the online comic (folks, stick with it for the first 2 years, it's worth it for the backstory when you get to the good stuff.) So I see Bun-Bun on the Baen site, the comic gets a lot of press in John Ringo's book, and now I see some of it at David Weber's website. Is there some hidden cosmic connection that links them all?
Note - the book club edition has the same cover art (the one that touts the CD inside), but I don't believe that it has the CD inside it. Can anyone confirm this one way or another?
Some more good stuff that is included on the CD (at least, on the CD I got...):
John Ringo's Posleen series (Hymn before Battle, Gust Front, When the Devil Dances). The bad thing about the CD was I couldn't stop reading - I went through two books a day until I polished off the Honor Harrington books - and that's a lot of books (about 350-500k per, compressed!) The other bad thing is once you've finished them off, you're left waiting until John Ringo and David Weber put out the next installments in their respective series. In the case of When the Devil Dances, that's one hell of a cliff-hanger he's got...
It's an interesting experiment. If the goal was to introduce new readers to stable authors, and to get them used to reading webscription type books, then I think they've succeeded. Those are two series I wouldn't mind adding as hardcovers to my library, and I am much more receptive to getting them as webscription editions for my laptop or for my palmpilot.
After being a rabid spam-fighter for years, I finally had to retire - manually taking out spammers was eating up too much of my time. I spent a week setting up Spamassassin, procmail, spamcop, and a few other procmail based filters, to create a universal filtering solution for all my mail. After I set it all up, it worked great, 99.99% of spam to that address was taken care of
Fast forward a few months later to the present. Now all my e-mail addresses (academic, etc.) have some form of filtering on them, mostly spamassassin based. Unfortunately, the spammers seem to be learning, as more and more crap gets through. Very low key spam - a paragraph and a URL, no caps, no trigger words, no malformed headers, but extremely annoying.
At that point, what do you do? Don't get me wrong - without spamassassin, I'd be drowning in over 60 pieces of spam per day, but I can forsee the day when spamassassin has effectively been neutered in the spam vs. anti-spam arms race. I guess when that happens, I'll have to switch to whitelisting and challenge/response to authenticate new senders... Or, we could do the smart thing now and outlaw spammers before we let e-mail suffer the same fate as usenet. Besides, ignoring spammers isn't as much fun as subjecting them to the tortuous hell of the American legal system.
In the US, land is cheap (land outside of major developed areas, that is.) Laws and taxes are such that building housing developments, and selling the idea of owning your own home is quite profitable, environmental impact be damned. As a result, sprawling residential developments spring up all over the place, overloading existing infrastructure (power, roads, telecommunications, sewer, water, hospital/school/police/fire.)
As more and more people move out into the boonies (and enduring 1-2hr commute times to and back from work), they demand improvements, like highway widening, more roads, etc. The growing tax base, and larger residential population now justify development of commercial properties, such as shopping malls - and guess who owns the land? Yep, the original developers, or attached arms thereof. Soon the area incorporates, and the politicans of that burblet start clamoring for state and federal funds to fix the mess that the developers created.
In the meantime, everyone who lives between the newly spawned burblet and where most of the residents work has to share increased commute times due to vehicle congestion, and greater pollution. Mass transit using buses fails miserably in this kind of situation, as buses have to share the roads with the worsening traffic, trapping mass transit riders in a commuter's nightmare. Solutions using rail, be it subway, commuter light rail, or a monorail/peoplemover, where the mass transit solution has right of way, are far superior, as you can cut commute times in half and thereby offer a reasonable and useful alternative to driving your own car.
Realistically though, unless all the burblets are in a straight line, leading to the commercial/industrial section of the city (hehe, simcity - a great urban planning tool), retrofitting any area with rail transit is an expensive and questionable pursuit. The key thing is right of way - and high density development around that right of way. Current development is low density, and unless you want to force people to rezone the properties along the proposed rail line, there won't be enough people riding mass transit to make it viable for the short to mid-term. In the long term, the idea is that having a rail line will convince people to re-orient their lives around it - but without a critical mass of transit options (a train that goes 3 miles is not useful), nobody's gonna ride it.
Huh? Their "fuel" is hydrogen peroxide, which converts to steam when it hits the catalyzing screens just prior to the engine nozzles. The screens should be plenty hot when they hit higher altitudes, and a pressure sphere will increase in performance (up to a point) as the the outer atmospheric pressure decreases. I really don't see how a turbopump comes into the equation, as you don't have separate fuel/oxidizers to combine and ignite.
The nice thing about spamassassin is that you can implement rules to derive scoring from third party services (ie, SPEWS, SpamCop, etc.) as part of the overall scoring procedure. The feedback loop is much longer, but via third parties, you can train the final output to exclude known spammers once you've reported them. Not as nifty as a local learning system, but I get a much broader exposure, and hopefully, and more accurate weighting via the reports of other users.
Aren't ricochet wireless modems serial-communicable radio modems? You can get the older ones for fairly cheap, and the newer ones for probably about $30-40 a piece. Older ones being preferable in areas where Ricochet has been reactivated, due to issues with them deliberately crippling your point-to-point connectivity with the newer modems.
The instant they put up an orbital weapons platform capable of negating US nuclear superiority. Of course, when that event occurs, we'll be screwed beyond all hope of rescue (unless we have big frickin "lasers" by then that actually work on ballistic missiles...)
Banned R You?
Mod -1 for lameness!
I wholeheartedly agree. The Russians have plenty of space hardware available for cheap - but you have to understand, that NASA is really all about politics right now. If the congresscritters don't get their pork-barrel allocation out of the NASA budget, they get cranky, and start stamping their feet. If I were in charge of NASA, the first thing I'd do is negotiate a bulk purchase of rockets, and needed consultants. The private sector has the right idea - they use Russian tech to launch comsats into space, and we use Russian tech to launch the resupply missions to the ISS (ie the escape pod.) Thanks for the link on the big boosters. It's a shame to let that kind of heavy lift capability lie fallow [Energia boosters]:
Payload from Baikonur
95-100 tons to 51-degree LEO
18 tons to geostationary orbit
32 tons to the lunar transfer
28 tons to Venus and Mars
We feared the Soviets. Their launching of the first artificial satellite scared the shit out of the American populace, and further enhanced the boogeyman image of the Soviets, pulling ahead of us in terms of military might, scientific knowledge, "superior society", and expansion via sympathetic regimes/revolution. Our increase in engineers and scientists can be traced to the increased emphasis on science and engineering to "beat the Soviets." Now that the Soviet threat is gone, people are happy being stupid.
China is a different story. Most people here in the US really don't take them seriously as a threat. Hell we buy most of our goods from them, and that trend will only increase, given the low labor costs and the high amounts of foreign investment in China. Unless China does something stupid, like try and conquer Korea and Taiwan, nobody here will consider them a threat worth competing with. Ergo, if they get to the moon, we'll just yawn, and continue ceeding the future of mankind to them.
Question is, even if we wanted to put the Saturn V back into operation, do we have the institutional know-how to do it? I expect most of the engineers from the original program have long been retired, or (in case of some of the older ones) probably deceased. Sure we may have the plans, but without people who know what the hell they're doing, you can be there WILL be catestrophic failures... which will be VERY ugly with a 100 ton payload. Jeez, do we even have any contractors who are qualified to build the beast? What about subcontractors???
Too bad we're not spending more on space exploration (exploitation) - it'd be a great way to employ a lot of very skilled workers, instead of letting them disperse to designing webpages, or teaching basic high school math as probationary teachers...
Isn't the problem with space (and science more generally) that "the people" just don't care about it, but rather like watching spectacles and human drama (the chalenger crash, Apollo 13).
So we just have to hold a contest, like survivor, to select an "average joe" and launch their ass into space, with plenty of publicity and press coverage. We can also feed the public a lot of bullshit about setting up bases on the moon, mining asteroids, and replacing the shuttle, which should hopefully jar some pennies loose from the appropriations commitee so we can do one of the three for real...
Just make sure we send up an inanimate carbon rod with this guy just in case things go wrong...
The shuttle fleet is made up of damn prototypes. That's all they are - they were never meant to operate as a long term fleet, but were meant instead to serve as a testbed for the next generation of orbital lift vehicles, which would build upon the lessons of the shuttle, and maximize operating efficiency. As as a consequence, we end up rebuilding the damn things after every launch, none of the shuttles are completely standardized with any of the other shuttles, and we have no cargo-only module (meaning we waste payload space on crew and required life support/recovery equipment.) Oh, and by the way, did I mention how goddamn expensive it is to recover and rebuild all the damn components?
Right now, they're re-welding the hydrogen feed lines, and a recent launch was scrubbed because they were leaking oxygen, despite having inspected the feed lines. I'd rather we move to using Russian spacecraft if we want to go back to big dumb boosters. Unfortunately, it looks like the "new" NASA budget will be pork-barreled to death to preserve congressional influence in funding current programs (shuttle, space station, token amount to new lift capability so they can claim research into new technologies.) The sad consequence of this is that the Chinese will probably have better heavy lift capability than we do before the end of the decade is out, despite having a 30 year disadvantage, and restrictions on US technology transfers...
And I mean REALLY bad movies. Movies so bad, they never made it to the theatre, despite their multi-million dollar price tag. Movies that went straight to video instead...
I guess it boils down to concept/script, and execution/production. If the concept sucks, it doesn't matter how nice looking it is, and if the execution falls through, it isn't worth even trying.
Lesson: producers are eternal optimists (and damn bandits to boot.) Before the hyped-up, money laden days of the dot comers, movie producers (and game producers by extension) had the shady accounting, super hype, sell the idea (instead of the product), raise and spend some else's money thing down pat. That they rise and fall on almost a daily basis shouldn't surprise anyone.
Finger was great when everyone with an account was a shell user at an academic or corporate research facility. You could check office hours, get someone's extension so you could call them, check to see if they had come in today. Soon after spammers started abusing every RFC on the books, and security became an issue due to the continuing hordes of wanna-be hackers, Finger disappeared.
Maybe you could get people to re-establish a limited directory service, but there are a lot of downsides to giving spammers a tool to check whether your e-mail address is legit or not. Even worse, I'm sure those database miners would have a field day tying your phone/address/e-mail/name to the records they can get from county, state records (think property taxes), and the credit bureaus. I had a tough enough time convincing the shitheads at Lohemanns that I was not a customer of theirs, and the crap they sent to me over a 6 month period was pure aggravation - even worse was the idea that they bought a bad database merge that happened to tie my e-mail address to that customer's name.
Of the 6 gas stations in my area, none of them sell diesel.
As mentioned in previous posts, US diesel fuel is pretty dirty stuff - you need only need to take a look at metropolitian buses to see that.
For the US, perhaps not Europe, hybrids are the best solution to an emissions, not an efficiency problem. Sure, we'd love to increase fuel economy here in the states, but given that gas is $1.59 in most places, we're not hurting if our cars don't break 50mpg either. Where we do have serious problems is in the sheer number of cars in traffic - if we can kill emissions while people are doing the hour-long stop'n'go to and from work, that's a lot of fuel that stays in the car, rather than getting thrown into the local airstream.
Ethanol production from crops is also currently subsidized by the federal government. Hopefully, if they decide to incorporate ethanol into the nation fuel stocks as a replacement additive, there will be efficiences in volume, but you can bet that the farming states will hang on to subsidies for as long as they possibly can.
If you mean the RAV4 EV, that's not a hybrid - that's a pure electric vehicle. It also retails for 40k (not counting the discounts and incentives from state and federal govts.), and is sold pretty much only in California. Of course, you go get HOV access, you can charge it all over the play for free (lots of unused charging stations here in SoCal) and it is a SUV, but the question is, would you foot a 40k bill for a battery pack insured for only 5 years?
Of course, if they do have a hybrid RAV4 - let me know!
there are bound to be losses associated with taking electricity to produce hydrogen and oxygen for a fuel cell.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to just take the electricity to power the car itself instead?
Depends on the energy density of the storage medium. Converting electric power to hydrogen, then using a fuel cell to convert it back to electricity, is the same thing as charging a battery (and converting electricity to whatever chemical state the battery uses to store power) and then tapping the battery later to get that electricity back. Both involve losses, but depending on energy density and charging losses, hydrogen is theoretically a better choice because you can generate your hydrogen somewhere else, and continuously refuel your fuel cell (with maybe a 5 min stop at the liquid hydrogen refuling station) With batteries, you'd have to swap out or recharge your current set in order to top-off the energy capacity of your car.
Now, whether that actually proves true in practice really depends on how advanced the infrastructure is when they start deploying fuel-cell vehicles.
http://www.gateworld.net/infinity/index.shtml
A quote from the page:
I should hope not!!!
Just so people know, these 4 are supposed to be Air Force cadets...
Every episode has some hit-you-over-the-head moral. (Does that make it count towards some FCC-mandated children's programming with morals quota?)
Yes. Actually it does. If you look at the writer's bible for many animated shows, there's a studio-inserted bit about contributing a positive moral message, which is a direct result of FCC education requirements.
If you write an episode for SG-Infinity, you'd better make sure nobody dies, and the good guys do good things. Kind of limits what you can do, but hey, constraints are supposed to be good for the creative juices, right?
Lets say it together "Saturday Morning CARTOON" other than a lot of kids not getting the better writing so easily, most of them do. Writers just don't get it....
Actually, many writers do "get it", but what you write has to get approved by the story editor and the director. Ever seen an episode where the writer was an idiot and failed to provide a reason for some special item, or had them do something, but never followed through in the payoff? You can bet someone cut pages from the script, and of course, when they cut, they ALWAYS manage to cut the pivotal story points... And, again, for "children's shows", your writing is subject to the scrutiny of the network censors (aka, television standards and practices), which limits the kinds of things you can put the characters through, not to mention again, the requirement that your story have some sort of moral point.
BTW, has anyone managed to figure out how Enterprise has managed to stay in such nice shape, without resupply or docking facilities? I would have dirtied up the ship a bit more for the show, after all, it has been a year since it started it's mission...