Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?
The concept doesn't work at low speeds so you would have to use stored hydrogen as fuel until the speed gets high enough for the magnetic scoop to be effective.
In Niven's setting, starships leaving Sol used light sails to get up to ramscoop speeds. Not being patient enough just to ride sunlight, they built huge lasers in the outer solar system to give them a little extra kick. When one day the kzinti arrived to raid the defenceless, unarmed, peaceful human race, these lasers were... repurposed.
Of course Jack Brennan the sometime asteroid miner turned superintelligent extraterrestrial mutant trickster had to do it differently. Unfortunately he did not leave blueprints for the devices he used to manipulate gravity like that, and his entire artificial world in the Kuiper belt got crushed onto the surface of his pet neutronium globe as he left. So we're stuck with the lasers.
It's not just Freeware, either. How many of us have found low-cost Shareware products to be incredibly useful for the stuff we do, when comparable commercial products would have nearly required a second mortgage?
The terminology here makes me go eeeeeewwww. 'Freeware' has some bad connotations. Too much stuff labelled as 'freeware' in the late nineties, early 21st century, was free because it was riddled with spyware or worse. Moreover it wasn't truly free: usually you were free to copy it and pass it on, which is a good start, but where is the code so that I can modify it to meet my needs more exactly? What do you mean I can't have it?
What we are dealing in today is Free Software. Linux, GNU, X.org, GNOME, Firefox = free, open source software from top to bottom with no added evil. We want to draw a distinction between that and the awful 'freeware' that riddled the w32 platform back in the day.
No-one outside the space geek community seems to have noticed, but the Ariane-V launched ATV cargo vessel (payload: ~20 tons) has now launched human flight-rated hardware (the ATV, now docked to ISS), albeit without humans in it when it went off. I suspect there are some interesting things being doodled on napkins at cafes and bars all over Darmstadt.
The original plan for Ariane V was that it would be the launcher for the Hermes spaceplane. Every so often the idea of a European manned spacecraft gets kicked around; they were talking about going in with the Russians to develop the Kliper a while back, but the current favourite appears to be a capsule design, based on Soyuz in the same sort of way that Orion is based on Apollo.
ESA is certainly capable of doing this - the ATV is ample proof of that. Whether we'll actually get around to it is another matter. Hermes was cancelled because constant overruns and design alterations sent the costs through the roof, and the Germans got tired of signing all the cheques. They'll be wary of getting drawn in to another project that might end as nothing more than a heap of extremely expensive paperwork. Britain won't even consider getting involved; it's a longstanding national policy to work only on unmanned space missions. Like many grand European projects, the politics is a bloody nightmare.
"The Flintstones" (1994) was one of the few successes.
Unfortunately, it sucked. Really, it was terrible.
My favourite adaptation of a Western cartoon has got to be Popeye. That wasn't a great film either, but it was magnificent - whatever it was about it that made it feel right I don't know, but even though these were actors made out of meat I could accept them immediately as the characters I knew.
I actually think Scooby-Doo worked quite well too. For a while. Scored major points with me for showing how they all hated Scrappy as much as we did. It fell apart quite badly towards the end though.
However, this won't be such a problem for Ghost in the Shell. It's nothing remotely like Western animation; it's very, very realistic in terms of its character and art design. Don't think of it in terms of those shows you used to watch as a kid in the morning. This is Japan's Blade Runner.
Combine that with the consistent problem of bad obnoxious translations ("Believe it!")
Let's be fair to them on this one... how would you translate the '-tebayo' suffix? It's an obnoxious mutilation of Japanese which Naruto uses for emphasis - that whatever his verb was, he totally means it and is going to be Hokage some day because of it. The translation's not so bad. It's just that Naruto really is that annoying.
In the US something named Robotech would make 5x as much money as something named Macross, even if it's the same movie.
It should actually be the same four or five movies, badly edited together, and then poorly redubbed to cover up the plot holes. Hey, it worked with Shogun Assassin...
Wrong! In this post-9/11 control-by-fear world, the average person would take one look at an oscilloscope and run away screaming that there is a BOMB in their HOUSE!
While true, this is awfully strange, since no bombs were involved in 9/11 in any way:-)
he conjectures that because the stars at the core are so close together, one supernova-ing could cause a chain reaction that would bring killing radiation to all reaches of the galaxy. What do astrophysicists today think of this possibility? All the hype now seems to be on black holes.
It's not thought likely. Supernovae are triggered by the collapse of a star's core; external phenomena don't have a great deal to do with it. However, active galactic nuclei have been known about for quite some time. Perhaps when Niven was writing, the idea that active galaxies were powered by chained supernova swarms was current in the literature.
The contemporary model for such phenomena is that the gas swirling around the black hole is heated by friction and by compression as it moves inward. Consider: you're dropping thousands of solar masses through the deepest gravity well in the universe. That releases an awful lot of energy. It makes little difference to Niven's nightmare scenario: it's entirely possible that our Galaxy was active in this way in the past, may become so again in the future, and may even be a little bit active right now. If anyone were to go to the galactic core today in a General Products #3 hull with a quantum-II hyperdrive and discover that the X-ray flux was way, way higher than it ought to be... then we'd better start making plans to run to Andromeda, now.
It was designed by an Englishman and built by a British company in what was still part of the British Empire...
Belfast still is part of the UK even today. There've been changes in how the North is run since the 1997 agreement, but the 32-county Republic remains a distant dream.
... And here was me thinking that was just a nationalist myth. You mean the Belfast shipbuilders really did say that stuff about the Pope when they put 'em in?
Hillary is "the most competent leader running for office"? When did that happen? John McCain spent more time fighting and bleeding for our country than Hillary Clinton has in elected office
Why are Americans always so keen to elect soldiers? Is prior military experience really a good indicator of future success as a political leader?
I'm pretty sure it varies from state to state. CA does it, but I don't think CO does for example. As I explain to the occasional european there are legal differences between states because of the fact that the US is a union of states rather than a state with provinces.
Funnily enough, the EU is a union of states too, but far less close a union than the USA. Each state has its own taxation system, its own army, its own legal system. Some states still maintain their own currency. Yet when I import goods from another member state for my own use, no tax is payable. Duty is only payable on goods I mean to sell.
Not that anybody's told HM Customs about this. They still seem to think there's some 'personal allowance' and that you have to pay them if you have more than a certain amount of booze and fags in the back when you get back from Calais. Not so; but just you try convincing them that the entire truckload of cigarettes you've got are for your own use...
They feel they are fighting for survival. Yes I know good riddance. All the garage bands will happily provide for all your music needs. Well here's food for thought, if you can get all your music from garage bands then why do you care what the music companies do? I know the fantasy is you'll eventually get slick studio music from top artists for free and the record companies will one day cave in and give away all the music no matter what it costs to produce. Time to wake up it's an industry and without profits they will do something else for a living.
Fine, whatever, let 'em burn. The Internet is orders of magnitude bigger than rock and roll. If the preservation of the music and movies industry means we have to cripple the freedom of the network, to give Hollywood a veto over every new technology, to mandate lockouts in all computers to protect their imaginary property, then it's not worth it. Even if it means there'll never be another international rock superstar.
I'm guessing they were talking more about "stealing songs", but I mean aren't there already laws against copyright infringment? Why would you need a second law for the exact same thing?
Stealing songs is already a crime: if you walk into a store, take a heap of CDs, and walk out with them without paying, you can be arrested. Copyright infringement isn't a crime: if you walk into a store, copy the heap of CDs, and walk out with the copies without paying, you can't be arrested. It's to do with one being theft, and the other not being theft, because they're completely different things.
That is pretty nice actually.... but, whose against it then? The French? Why?
Balance of power. The EU used to be dominated by France and Germany. They formed a voting bloc that almost always got its way, by sheer weight of population and hence voting rights; the other four founding nations, Italy and the three Low Countries tended to go along. Later Britain and Spain and a number of smaller nations joined and the power balance shifted a little, but not really enough to dislodge the old central axis most of the time. Now half of the old Warsaw Pact is in, and Poland in particular has a very big block of votes and is awfully friendly with Britain (home to something like half a million Polish expats). Power has very much shifted towards the periphery.
Now we propose to bring in Turkey. They would be the most populous state in the Union. They'd be more powerful than either France or Germany. C'est intolérable!
Oh, and if Turkey joins then all those 'guest workers' in Germany who've been second-class for decades get full citizenship rights on the spot. And the EU gets to have a border on Iraq, which is plainly about to sink into the most horrible sort of a civil war.
You forget that the USA population is growing, while Europe's population is in decline.
Actually, the population of the EU is increasing. Fast. We may not be doing an awful lot of breeding, but look at those borders go! We're the only major power on earth with an active policy of territorial expansion.
but when you start losing jobs in Ottawa, Paris, London and Berlin because of a foolish trade war, then, would you at least miss Bush for his stance on free trade?
This is the same Bush who imposed crippling tariffs on European steel firms to protect American firms? And who suddenly saw the importance of free trade once the EU imposed sanctions on the products of several swing states just before the election?
Oh, and what about the bleak future when there is only war! Children should be forced to learn about this as well. How will they prepare their distant descendants for Imperial service otherwise?
The average high school closely resembles a Chaos cult anyway. I think they'll cope.
Maybe someone has found out how to write educational games that are fun to play. Maybe the situation has changed. I still have to be convinced.
Well, there's Brain Age, which has done more for the nation's mental arithmetic skills than anything else since Carol Vorderman. That's fun all right, and I don't think it's left the top ten bestsellers list in the last two years.
Other than that: you'd be surprised how much you pick up from Sid Meier. The background information in the Civilopedia and its eqivalents in Colonization and Pirates is really good stuff. OK, so I wrote in that one history essay that the Royal Navy's imperial dreadnoughts had a one in eight chance of being sunk when attacking a city guarded by spearmen. Still, I once got full marks on a geography assignment for writing about a bunch of ecology concepts I'd learned playing the terraforming scenarios from SimEarth. Most kids don't use the word 'biome'.
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Bill Gates has never understood this. Read his open letter to hobbyists.
Amazing, isn't it?
In Niven's setting, starships leaving Sol used light sails to get up to ramscoop speeds. Not being patient enough just to ride sunlight, they built huge lasers in the outer solar system to give them a little extra kick. When one day the kzinti arrived to raid the defenceless, unarmed, peaceful human race, these lasers were... repurposed.
Of course Jack Brennan the sometime asteroid miner turned superintelligent extraterrestrial mutant trickster had to do it differently. Unfortunately he did not leave blueprints for the devices he used to manipulate gravity like that, and his entire artificial world in the Kuiper belt got crushed onto the surface of his pet neutronium globe as he left. So we're stuck with the lasers.
In production. Supersonic stealth jump jet = belongs in Macross :-)
The terminology here makes me go eeeeeewwww. 'Freeware' has some bad connotations. Too much stuff labelled as 'freeware' in the late nineties, early 21st century, was free because it was riddled with spyware or worse. Moreover it wasn't truly free: usually you were free to copy it and pass it on, which is a good start, but where is the code so that I can modify it to meet my needs more exactly? What do you mean I can't have it?
What we are dealing in today is Free Software. Linux, GNU, X.org, GNOME, Firefox = free, open source software from top to bottom with no added evil. We want to draw a distinction between that and the awful 'freeware' that riddled the w32 platform back in the day.
The original plan for Ariane V was that it would be the launcher for the Hermes spaceplane. Every so often the idea of a European manned spacecraft gets kicked around; they were talking about going in with the Russians to develop the Kliper a while back, but the current favourite appears to be a capsule design, based on Soyuz in the same sort of way that Orion is based on Apollo.
ESA is certainly capable of doing this - the ATV is ample proof of that. Whether we'll actually get around to it is another matter. Hermes was cancelled because constant overruns and design alterations sent the costs through the roof, and the Germans got tired of signing all the cheques. They'll be wary of getting drawn in to another project that might end as nothing more than a heap of extremely expensive paperwork. Britain won't even consider getting involved; it's a longstanding national policy to work only on unmanned space missions. Like many grand European projects, the politics is a bloody nightmare.
Unfortunately, it sucked. Really, it was terrible.
My favourite adaptation of a Western cartoon has got to be Popeye. That wasn't a great film either, but it was magnificent - whatever it was about it that made it feel right I don't know, but even though these were actors made out of meat I could accept them immediately as the characters I knew.
I actually think Scooby-Doo worked quite well too. For a while. Scored major points with me for showing how they all hated Scrappy as much as we did. It fell apart quite badly towards the end though.
However, this won't be such a problem for Ghost in the Shell. It's nothing remotely like Western animation; it's very, very realistic in terms of its character and art design. Don't think of it in terms of those shows you used to watch as a kid in the morning. This is Japan's Blade Runner.
Let's be fair to them on this one... how would you translate the '-tebayo' suffix? It's an obnoxious mutilation of Japanese which Naruto uses for emphasis - that whatever his verb was, he totally means it and is going to be Hokage some day because of it. The translation's not so bad. It's just that Naruto really is that annoying.
It should actually be the same four or five movies, badly edited together, and then poorly redubbed to cover up the plot holes. Hey, it worked with Shogun Assassin...
Kipling would be proud.
While true, this is awfully strange, since no bombs were involved in 9/11 in any way :-)
Actually, there's a much shorter lawyers' way to tell somebody to do that.
"We refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram."
It's not thought likely. Supernovae are triggered by the collapse of a star's core; external phenomena don't have a great deal to do with it. However, active galactic nuclei have been known about for quite some time. Perhaps when Niven was writing, the idea that active galaxies were powered by chained supernova swarms was current in the literature.
The contemporary model for such phenomena is that the gas swirling around the black hole is heated by friction and by compression as it moves inward. Consider: you're dropping thousands of solar masses through the deepest gravity well in the universe. That releases an awful lot of energy. It makes little difference to Niven's nightmare scenario: it's entirely possible that our Galaxy was active in this way in the past, may become so again in the future, and may even be a little bit active right now. If anyone were to go to the galactic core today in a General Products #3 hull with a quantum-II hyperdrive and discover that the X-ray flux was way, way higher than it ought to be... then we'd better start making plans to run to Andromeda, now.
Belfast still is part of the UK even today. There've been changes in how the North is run since the 1997 agreement, but the 32-county Republic remains a distant dream.
... And here was me thinking that was just a nationalist myth. You mean the Belfast shipbuilders really did say that stuff about the Pope when they put 'em in?
Why are Americans always so keen to elect soldiers? Is prior military experience really a good indicator of future success as a political leader?
Funnily enough, the EU is a union of states too, but far less close a union than the USA. Each state has its own taxation system, its own army, its own legal system. Some states still maintain their own currency. Yet when I import goods from another member state for my own use, no tax is payable. Duty is only payable on goods I mean to sell.
Not that anybody's told HM Customs about this. They still seem to think there's some 'personal allowance' and that you have to pay them if you have more than a certain amount of booze and fags in the back when you get back from Calais. Not so; but just you try convincing them that the entire truckload of cigarettes you've got are for your own use...
If you can go 20 times as fast with 60 times the energy, I'd be seriously impressed. Normally that takes 400 times the energy.
Fine, whatever, let 'em burn. The Internet is orders of magnitude bigger than rock and roll. If the preservation of the music and movies industry means we have to cripple the freedom of the network, to give Hollywood a veto over every new technology, to mandate lockouts in all computers to protect their imaginary property, then it's not worth it. Even if it means there'll never be another international rock superstar.
Stealing songs is already a crime: if you walk into a store, take a heap of CDs, and walk out with them without paying, you can be arrested. Copyright infringement isn't a crime: if you walk into a store, copy the heap of CDs, and walk out with the copies without paying, you can't be arrested. It's to do with one being theft, and the other not being theft, because they're completely different things.
Balance of power. The EU used to be dominated by France and Germany. They formed a voting bloc that almost always got its way, by sheer weight of population and hence voting rights; the other four founding nations, Italy and the three Low Countries tended to go along. Later Britain and Spain and a number of smaller nations joined and the power balance shifted a little, but not really enough to dislodge the old central axis most of the time. Now half of the old Warsaw Pact is in, and Poland in particular has a very big block of votes and is awfully friendly with Britain (home to something like half a million Polish expats). Power has very much shifted towards the periphery.
Now we propose to bring in Turkey. They would be the most populous state in the Union. They'd be more powerful than either France or Germany. C'est intolérable!
Oh, and if Turkey joins then all those 'guest workers' in Germany who've been second-class for decades get full citizenship rights on the spot. And the EU gets to have a border on Iraq, which is plainly about to sink into the most horrible sort of a civil war.
Actually, the population of the EU is increasing. Fast. We may not be doing an awful lot of breeding, but look at those borders go! We're the only major power on earth with an active policy of territorial expansion.
... Well, shit. I'd nearly saved up enough to buy a General Products hull, and now it seems they've shut up shop and left town.
This is the same Bush who imposed crippling tariffs on European steel firms to protect American firms? And who suddenly saw the importance of free trade once the EU imposed sanctions on the products of several swing states just before the election?
The average high school closely resembles a Chaos cult anyway. I think they'll cope.
Well, there's Brain Age, which has done more for the nation's mental arithmetic skills than anything else since Carol Vorderman. That's fun all right, and I don't think it's left the top ten bestsellers list in the last two years.
Other than that: you'd be surprised how much you pick up from Sid Meier. The background information in the Civilopedia and its eqivalents in Colonization and Pirates is really good stuff. OK, so I wrote in that one history essay that the Royal Navy's imperial dreadnoughts had a one in eight chance of being sunk when attacking a city guarded by spearmen. Still, I once got full marks on a geography assignment for writing about a bunch of ecology concepts I'd learned playing the terraforming scenarios from SimEarth. Most kids don't use the word 'biome'.