Sidious seems to see an aprentice more as an expendable asset than anything else. I suspect he prefers to have the most powerfull possible single aprentice for that purpose but other sith lords might choose to have more than one apprentice.
Also the need to slay an apprentice to become one cannot be the only way, if it was where would the first one for a newly minted sith master come from?
I suspect to become an aprentice you just gotta be strong enough for a master to accept you.
Now slaying a master to become one might be one way, but I suspect if someone skilled in the sith way and strong enough chose call himself master did so it'd pretty much be a moot point.
Besides you forget that apprentice slaying/supplanting/etc. his master is normal amoung sith, this doesn't worry sidious, after all he's SIDIOUS and MUCH smarter than silly little vader (after all he turned him to the dark side after he became a full jedi) and can easily handle the plots any apprentice is likely to have against his master.
At least that's likely his thinking. Plus it's clear he's planning on replacing Vader with Luke and Vader as lukes father is his best tool to do so, after all that what aprentices are, tools. Thus a scolding that convinces Vader to keep working on bringing Luke in is his best MO.
Some of your points make sense (the younglings scene, reminds me of the 'in under 12 parsecs' fubar of ANH).
But while the gremlins instead of explosives thing wouldn't make sense if destroying those two WAS the point (it wasn't, more later) it did seem kinda odd that our Jedi heros didn't say "WTF? kinda silly way to kill someone" unless you posit some reason why gremlins would be normally be used (eigther the fact the the SW universe has a major woody for droids, or that salvage was important or live prisoners, or some field prevented nukes/high explosives from working or some other stretch of reason.
However NOT blowing up the Jedi is almost certainly EXACTLY in plan for Palpy as he is setting up Anakin to be his 'hero' and to supplant Doku as the other sith in power (Anakin is both stronger and more maleable given his age/experience). Being a force wielder he knows a pair of Jedi should be able to handle the droids as they take time to work. And if they can't it only proves he almost picked the wrong aprentice to replace Doku.
While the way it was portrayed was a bit weak the whole end of the light sabre fight makes sense, but might require reading between the lines. Obi-wan's 'don't try it' makes it clear he can tell what Anakin is about to 'try' and from having 'been like a brother' to Anakin and teaching him everything and working together for YEARS knows the current situation is one he can't loose. Anakin feeling the raw, crack-like, power of the darkside foolishly thinks he can pull it off.
The droid/slapstick thing is a matter of taste I suspect, but it bugged me at times as well and R2's and to a lesser degree Yoda's acrobatics were a bit to much in places.
As far as trusting Anakin to the presence of Palpatine, well that pretty much presumes on the backstory between TCW and ROTS. Rember in the interviening timeframe Anakin has become a full Jedi in his own right and Obi-Wan has risen to the council. Plus Anakin has been behaving himself just fine (as far as they know) other than seeming to have befriended a suspicious character in the person of Chancellor Palpatine. The angry vengefull part I have no clue where you got that other than Palpy's giving Anaking a rationalization for killing Doku that suits his purposes.
Also how much do they suspect really? On one hand they know the darkside is heavy around palpy, on the other the fact that he's Sith seems a fair bit more than they had suspected. I'm thinking the point was they suspected Palpy might be under the influence of, or maybe even working with a sith, but not the hidden sith himself.
Yoda running off, I'll admit best I can offer is a rather weak supposition that he was able to determine from that encounter that he wasn't likely to win. Maybe he convinced himself he had to survive if there were ever going to be more Jedi trained he being the only master other than Obi-Wan left. I Honestly expected them to fight untill outside influences somehow force them to seperate. Or perhaps for Palpy to win and think he'd killed Yoda, but be unable to verify it.
Gak, how could anyone like the cartoon crap. It's the worst of bad 70's animation and bad anime parody.
They tried to get those of us old enough to remember the cartoon styles of first trillogies era with nostalgia and the younger crowd with the anime feel and totaly wrecked it imho.
ROTS is deliberately designed to evoke the original trillogy.
Natalie Portman even studied Carie fishers acting to influence her style in this episode. She's even wearing that famous hairdo parrodied in Space Balls the first time you see her on-screen.
There are many other elements that clearly derive from ANH, but I won't spoil the movie by giving any more of them away.
But whatever else people knock the prequals for, clearly connecting ROTS and ANH is definately covered imho.
It might be possible to cover his past if he's the bad-guy. But it would require considerable skill.
And if you tried to show him as protagonist or do something like with Anakin it would indeed blow chunks and tarnish the mythology further.
I don't think even as a bad guy going back before his late aprenticeship would be a good idea.
Perhaps as cloaked, never really seen by the good guys, foil to early qui-con's jedi-hood. Perhaps having qui-con thinking he's finally defeated 'mysterious darth sidious' is what allows him to select a padwan named Obi-Wan from amoung Yoda's younglings (thus finally explaining the dicotomy between Obi-wan's statement of being trained by Yoda in ESB and the onscreen parring of him and Qui-con.
The ending of course would be Palpatine realizing that direct conflict isn't going to work and that perhaps a slower, more subtle path of political power, would be better. And of course he takes advantage somewhere and gets Qui-con to Kill off his sith master for him while thinking he's got Palpy instead.
The only way you could do it(inho) is if you almost harp on Palpy being unremitant evil and smart and so on without actually harping on it. You'd have to make him as larger than life as possible without quite making him a godling.
Just a few ideas.
Cannon means what the original author/creator himself has done/written.
Thus (like it or not) the prequals being more directly from Lucas are more directly cannon.
Unless a different definition specific to SW has been established (with Lucas's endorsement). It's my understanding that Lucas considers the Zahn books second ONLY to what he's put (most recently in the case of things like Queedo/Solo shooting) on the screen/vhs/dvd.
Also I seem to remember reading in one of the books that the Death Star series was THREE deathstars. The original devlopement prototype that never had an outer shell and was mainly a proof of concept/testbed for several years. The final working version destroyed in ANH (built over a few years itself) and the enlarged (almost double IIRC) sequal blown up in ROTJ.
This parts a bit sketchy in my memory but I seem to recall that the prototype DS was started in secret by Palpatine before he was powerfull enough to do as he pleased after the higher ups in the military rejected the proposal for it durring the clone wars. I believe it was built in a black-hole cluster near Kessal(sp?).
That black hole cluster was used to patch Solo's "in under 12 parsecs" statment of how fast the Falcon was by claiming that the trick to the Kessle run was how short a path through/around the mess of black holes you could plot that your ship had the speed and toughness to handle.
Your talking about a LOT of special editions, not quite one per chip, but about one per hundred or so considering how many factors they test for and that not all of them are simple pass/fail (such as max stable speeds for parts).
No they are not manipulating the market, but rather taking advantage of known properties thereof.
This has been going on for some time, since before modern pc's I'd bet, in other markets as well. And it's a fact most people learn about same time as they get old enough to vote or drink, so no one is being deliberately fooled.
It's simular to how you can find two brands of the same product in a store with as much as a 2:1 price difference and yet they are the EXACT same thing.
For example I once worked at a factory that packaged charcoal briquettes(sp?). There are exactly four types of them defined by two binary properties. All hardwood or mixed, with or without lighting fluids added. That's it, the packaging is just packaging and who's name on the outside has no bearing on the contents. When we had enough of brand x all we did was switch the bags we were filling, it all came from the same bin with absolutely nothing done between bag switches.
Yet go look in a store at the costs of the various brands. The same amount of the same thing can cost from $5 to $20 depending on who's name is on the bag.
I'v 3 or four semi-functional modems (all internal) that've suffered line spikes durring storms.
Usually what gives is such that you can move the line from the wall from the modems line in to it's phone out jack and use it. However sometimes the connection isn't as good and I only do this till I can run buy a new one.
In one case the relay used to 'pick up the hook' as it were is visibly deformed from heat yet the phone out jack trick works just fine with it.
IIRC the original 486sx were indeed units with bad math-co's that had been dissabled that intell sold to help recoup some of thier manufacturing costs.
But they sold enough of them and then the slightly reworked dx's as 487's that they took to deliberately dissabling the math-co's (even after yeilds got much much better) on perfectly good 486dx's to keep up 'low end' sales and of course sales of 487s. This allowing them to not only sell more of each waffer, but have higher total sales.
Sounds like a direct or near direct hit. A ups is generally only good on sorta close hits and more normal line fluctuations.
Consider that lightning is ALREADY arcing from between clouds and ground. Something the size of an ups is unlikely to do any good against a direct hit, nor are they intended to. Fourtunately direct hits (or close enough to fry an ups) are rather rare.
Yeah, it IS much harder the second time. I fear if a third should occure I'd have siezures and anurisms and maybee the universe implode one fine morning or two.
The first time I KNEW I had it beat by the end of fourth day and was completely clear within a week or two.
The second time I'm still occassionally feeling a light nag from time to time a couple months later.
I quit after a few years then picked it back up like an idiot years later then quit again several months ago.
My advice is two-fold. First just plain quit, don't 'taper off' or any such non-sense, just stop cold and NO MATTER WHAT don't even come close to so much as a puff thereafter. Trust me you'll come up with all sorts of reasonable, smart, idiot to dissagree reasons to just smoke one more. THAT'S A TRICK your mind will play on you to satisfy the adiction.
Good luck, if you can steadfastly refuse to pick them back up no matter what you'll do fine.
If you've never tried before, just think of what Frodo went through trying to destroy the one ring, it's about like that (especially the constant subliminal pull to do otherwise slowly trying to erode the will) only compressed into a shorter time.
Yep, it happens. I used to get sterling reviews at a job. Through two transfers and 5 bosses I never got less than 95%, then this new boss shows up who decides she doesn't like me (she's like that, if your a guy you're on her verygood list or verybad list or gay, but she's just smart enough to not be flagrant about it) and suddenly I'm getting borderline reviews. No real change in what I'm doing except perhaps I'm working a tad harder, always do that with a new boss to set a good precedent.
Next she starts cutting back on the number of employees I'm allowed to schedule to get the job done so I (and my crew) have to work so twice as hard to get even less done. I lost several good employees thanks to her till I finally left there. I had a good crew under me till she showed up, and still had some of the better ones left when I finally quit.
That's usually more than they can say anyway. all they can say is wether you do or did work there, and whether they would re-hire you.
You can sue them lots of ways on this one. and probably get them in other sorts of trouble.
Assuming it's worth the effort.
I bought a trackball a few years ago because I didn't really have any flat area to use a mouse.
At first it was a pain to get used to, my thumb muscle was actually sore for a couple days from it.
But once I got used to it, it was so much more natural and intuitive that only programs that went out of thier way to fit a mouses peculiarities (actually just Black And White sofar) have given me any troubles. Whereas on most things the trackball is much easier and faster.
I still use the SAME trackball. An original trackman marble from Logitec that cost $75 or so at the time. Over three years ago IIRC. The thing has outlasted most any other pointing device I've ever owned by a factor of at least 4 if not 5 or 6.
I'm not suprised your trackball player has high accuracy. Think about how a trackball is moved vs a mouse. The mouse requires the slopier and more tireing motions of at least the lower arm/wrist muscles (and lots of people use the whole arm) and the whole pick up and move back to continue sequence that results in wasted time and a need for tiny correction as picking up and setting down a mouse usually move the ball a bit.
errr, it's a light gun, it's tethered to the fact that it HAS to point to the screen to read which pixel it's pointed at, and you're limited in distance based on how well it's optics can determine which point on the screen it's pointed at.
I suspect this will be more of an issue than tilt and bluetooth won't help that much.
This is kinda like fixing battery life in electric cars by using extension cords.
I wasn't working from numbers I had and mistakenly assumed you were working from ideals. My fault there.
That said I Know from a case where I had a purely mechanical failure stop an alternator (belt went, not slipped for a while then went, it was nearly new, rock or something hit it and sliced it). The battery was about 3 months old, and it was about this time of year.
I've heard simular time frames from friends and relatives. All anectedotal, but no 'hours' or even a full hour like some here are claiming.
Netscape 3.0gold was my favorite back in the day. Never really cared for IE just kinda got used to it on windows for a while till I got a decent ver of FF (.8 IIRC).
Can't say I blame some people for using ns3. FWIW my uncle (who's partly responsible for my early days in computers) refuses to budge from win3.1 + NS3.0.
I've been on the web (almost said online, that goes back even farther) and internet since late 95, seems to me it's gotten less useable and readable, not more.
I used to be able to read a site without having to play games with the screen resolutions and font sizes and still wasting 1/3 of the horizontal resolution of my monitor for starters.
On the rare site that didn't work (usually a bad link where / and \ got confused or an obvious misspelling such as htm for html or vice versa) a quick glance at the underlying html almost always revealed the problem and suggested the solution.
Now you've got how many 'standards' do define a web page and what kinda useless unreadable crap is the result?
Actually I don't have a problem with it if they lost a few early tries at manned space flight (unless it was through obvious at the time stupidity). Those are the risks in that sort of effort.
What would bother me is that they would hide thier heros like that. That's the shamefull thing to my mind. These guys would have knowingly taken a very high risk only to be deliberately hidden from thier proper places in history.
People like that should be honored, not swept under the carpet.
LOL I remember that show. One episode opened with them dissarming a nuke in some room, sledge says trust me I know what I'm doing. They pan out to a mushroom cloud and then the story proper starts with the subtitle 5 years earlier.
Always thought that was a bad move limiting the series to just 5 more years, but it never made it anyway.:)
Interesting, but all that is just a first approximation.
IF your car was brand new and had superconduting wires and no other draws on it's power and the battery was an ideal battery (perfect discharge till zero then nothing at all) you might get your 38 minutes.
Reality adds in line losses, the fact that a car battery is NOT designed to be used that way and all the side items the system has to power all add up to mean you'll get less than half that durring the day, and a LOT less at night.
Slashdot Mirror
Sidious seems to see an aprentice more as an expendable asset than anything else. I suspect he prefers to have the most powerfull possible single aprentice for that purpose but other sith lords might choose to have more than one apprentice.
Also the need to slay an apprentice to become one cannot be the only way, if it was where would the first one for a newly minted sith master come from?
I suspect to become an aprentice you just gotta be strong enough for a master to accept you.
Now slaying a master to become one might be one way, but I suspect if someone skilled in the sith way and strong enough chose call himself master did so it'd pretty much be a moot point.
Mycroft
Besides you forget that apprentice slaying/supplanting/etc. his master is normal amoung sith, this doesn't worry sidious, after all he's SIDIOUS and MUCH smarter than silly little vader (after all he turned him to the dark side after he became a full jedi) and can easily handle the plots any apprentice is likely to have against his master.
At least that's likely his thinking.
Plus it's clear he's planning on replacing Vader with Luke and Vader as lukes father is his best tool to do so, after all that what aprentices are, tools. Thus a scolding that convinces Vader to keep working on bringing Luke in is his best MO.
Mycroft
Some of your points make sense (the younglings scene, reminds me of the 'in under 12 parsecs' fubar of ANH).
But while the gremlins instead of explosives thing wouldn't make sense if destroying those two WAS the point (it wasn't, more later) it did seem kinda odd that our Jedi heros didn't say "WTF? kinda silly way to kill someone" unless you posit some reason why gremlins would be normally be used (eigther the fact the the SW universe has a major woody for droids, or that salvage was important or live prisoners, or some field prevented nukes/high explosives from working or some other stretch of reason.
However NOT blowing up the Jedi is almost certainly EXACTLY in plan for Palpy as he is setting up Anakin to be his 'hero' and to supplant Doku as the other sith in power (Anakin is both stronger and more maleable given his age/experience). Being a force wielder he knows a pair of Jedi should be able to handle the droids as they take time to work. And if they can't it only proves he almost picked the wrong aprentice to replace Doku.
While the way it was portrayed was a bit weak the whole end of the light sabre fight makes sense, but might require reading between the lines. Obi-wan's 'don't try it' makes it clear he can tell what Anakin is about to 'try' and from having 'been like a brother' to Anakin and teaching him everything and working together for YEARS knows the current situation is one he can't loose. Anakin feeling the raw, crack-like, power of the darkside foolishly thinks he can pull it off.
The droid/slapstick thing is a matter of taste I suspect, but it bugged me at times as well and R2's and to a lesser degree Yoda's acrobatics were a bit to much in places.
As far as trusting Anakin to the presence of Palpatine, well that pretty much presumes on the backstory between TCW and ROTS. Rember in the interviening timeframe Anakin has become a full Jedi in his own right and Obi-Wan has risen to the council. Plus Anakin has been behaving himself just fine (as far as they know) other than seeming to have befriended a suspicious character in the person of Chancellor Palpatine. The angry vengefull part I have no clue where you got that other than Palpy's giving Anaking a rationalization for killing Doku that suits his purposes.
Also how much do they suspect really? On one hand they know the darkside is heavy around palpy, on the other the fact that he's Sith seems a fair bit more than they had suspected. I'm thinking the point was they suspected Palpy might be under the influence of, or maybe even working with a sith, but not the hidden sith himself.
Yoda running off, I'll admit best I can offer is a rather weak supposition that he was able to determine from that encounter that he wasn't likely to win. Maybe he convinced himself he had to survive if there were ever going to be more Jedi trained he being the only master other than Obi-Wan left. I Honestly expected them to fight untill outside influences somehow force them to seperate. Or perhaps for Palpy to win and think he'd killed Yoda, but be unable to verify it.
Mycroft
Gak, how could anyone like the cartoon crap.
It's the worst of bad 70's animation and bad anime parody.
They tried to get those of us old enough to remember the cartoon styles of first trillogies era with nostalgia and the younger crowd with the anime feel and totaly wrecked it imho.
Mycroft
ROTS is deliberately designed to evoke the original trillogy.
Natalie Portman even studied Carie fishers acting to influence her style in this episode. She's even wearing that famous hairdo parrodied in Space Balls the first time you see her on-screen.
There are many other elements that clearly derive from ANH, but I won't spoil the movie by giving any more of them away.
But whatever else people knock the prequals for, clearly connecting ROTS and ANH is definately covered imho.
Mycroft
It might be possible to cover his past if he's the bad-guy. But it would require considerable skill.
And if you tried to show him as protagonist or do something like with Anakin it would indeed blow chunks and tarnish the mythology further.
I don't think even as a bad guy going back before his late aprenticeship would be a good idea.
Perhaps as cloaked, never really seen by the good guys, foil to early qui-con's jedi-hood. Perhaps having qui-con thinking he's finally defeated 'mysterious darth sidious' is what allows him to select a padwan named Obi-Wan from amoung Yoda's younglings (thus finally explaining the dicotomy between Obi-wan's statement of being trained by Yoda in ESB and the onscreen parring of him and Qui-con.
The ending of course would be Palpatine realizing that direct conflict isn't going to work and that perhaps a slower, more subtle path of political power, would be better. And of course he takes advantage somewhere and gets Qui-con to Kill off his sith master for him while thinking he's got Palpy instead.
The only way you could do it(inho) is if you almost harp on Palpy being unremitant evil and smart and so on without actually harping on it. You'd have to make him as larger than life as possible without quite making him a godling.
Just a few ideas.
Mycroft
Cannon means what the original author/creator himself has done/written.
Thus (like it or not) the prequals being more directly from Lucas are more directly cannon.
Unless a different definition specific to SW has been established (with Lucas's endorsement). It's my understanding that Lucas considers the Zahn books second ONLY to what he's put (most recently in the case of things like Queedo/Solo shooting) on the screen/vhs/dvd.
Also I seem to remember reading in one of the books that the Death Star series was THREE deathstars. The original devlopement prototype that never had an outer shell and was mainly a proof of concept/testbed for several years. The final working version destroyed in ANH (built over a few years itself) and the enlarged (almost double IIRC) sequal blown up in ROTJ.
This parts a bit sketchy in my memory but I seem to recall that the prototype DS was started in secret by Palpatine before he was powerfull enough to do as he pleased after the higher ups in the military rejected the proposal for it durring the clone wars. I believe it was built in a black-hole cluster near Kessal(sp?).
That black hole cluster was used to patch Solo's "in under 12 parsecs" statment of how fast the Falcon was by claiming that the trick to the Kessle run was how short a path through/around the mess of black holes you could plot that your ship had the speed and toughness to handle.
Mycroft
Your talking about a LOT of special editions, not quite one per chip, but about one per hundred or so considering how many factors they test for and that not all of them are simple pass/fail (such as max stable speeds for parts).
Mycroft
No they are not manipulating the market, but rather taking advantage of known properties thereof.
This has been going on for some time, since before modern pc's I'd bet, in other markets as well. And it's a fact most people learn about same time as they get old enough to vote or drink, so no one is being deliberately fooled.
It's simular to how you can find two brands of the same product in a store with as much as a 2:1 price difference and yet they are the EXACT same thing.
For example I once worked at a factory that packaged charcoal briquettes(sp?). There are exactly four types of them defined by two binary properties. All hardwood or mixed, with or without lighting fluids added. That's it, the packaging is just packaging and who's name on the outside has no bearing on the contents. When we had enough of brand x all we did was switch the bags we were filling, it all came from the same bin with absolutely nothing done between bag switches.
Yet go look in a store at the costs of the various brands. The same amount of the same thing can cost from $5 to $20 depending on who's name is on the bag.
Mycroft
I'v 3 or four semi-functional modems (all internal) that've suffered line spikes durring storms.
Usually what gives is such that you can move the line from the wall from the modems line in to it's phone out jack and use it. However sometimes the connection isn't as good and I only do this till I can run buy a new one.
In one case the relay used to 'pick up the hook' as it were is visibly deformed from heat yet the phone out jack trick works just fine with it.
Mycroft
IIRC the original 486sx were indeed units with bad math-co's that had been dissabled that intell sold to help recoup some of thier manufacturing costs.
But they sold enough of them and then the slightly reworked dx's as 487's that they took to deliberately dissabling the math-co's (even after yeilds got much much better) on perfectly good 486dx's to keep up 'low end' sales and of course sales of 487s. This allowing them to not only sell more of each waffer, but have higher total sales.
Mycroft
Sounds like a direct or near direct hit. A ups is generally only good on sorta close hits and more normal line fluctuations.
Consider that lightning is ALREADY arcing from between clouds and ground. Something the size of an ups is unlikely to do any good against a direct hit, nor are they intended to. Fourtunately direct hits (or close enough to fry an ups) are rather rare.
Mycroft
Yeah, it IS much harder the second time. I fear if a third should occure I'd have siezures and anurisms and maybee the universe implode one fine morning or two.
The first time I KNEW I had it beat by the end of fourth day and was completely clear within a week or two.
The second time I'm still occassionally feeling a light nag from time to time a couple months later.
Mycroft
I quit after a few years then picked it back up like an idiot years later then quit again several months ago.
My advice is two-fold. First just plain quit, don't 'taper off' or any such non-sense, just stop cold and NO MATTER WHAT don't even come close to so much as a puff thereafter. Trust me you'll come up with all sorts of reasonable, smart, idiot to dissagree reasons to just smoke one more. THAT'S A TRICK your mind will play on you to satisfy the adiction.
Good luck, if you can steadfastly refuse to pick them back up no matter what you'll do fine.
If you've never tried before, just think of what Frodo went through trying to destroy the one ring, it's about like that (especially the constant subliminal pull to do otherwise slowly trying to erode the will) only compressed into a shorter time.
Mycroft
Yep, it happens.
I used to get sterling reviews at a job. Through two transfers and 5 bosses I never got less than 95%, then this new boss shows up who decides she doesn't like me (she's like that, if your a guy you're on her verygood list or verybad list or gay, but she's just smart enough to not be flagrant about it) and suddenly I'm getting borderline reviews. No real change in what I'm doing except perhaps I'm working a tad harder, always do that with a new boss to set a good precedent.
Next she starts cutting back on the number of employees I'm allowed to schedule to get the job done so I (and my crew) have to work so twice as hard to get even less done. I lost several good employees thanks to her till I finally left there. I had a good crew under me till she showed up, and still had some of the better ones left when I finally quit.
Mycroft
That's usually more than they can say anyway.
all they can say is wether you do or did work there, and whether they would re-hire you.
You can sue them lots of ways on this one.
and probably get them in other sorts of trouble.
Assuming it's worth the effort.
Mycroft
I bought a trackball a few years ago because I didn't really have any flat area to use a mouse.
At first it was a pain to get used to, my thumb muscle was actually sore for a couple days from it.
But once I got used to it, it was so much more natural and intuitive that only programs that went out of thier way to fit a mouses peculiarities (actually just Black And White sofar) have given me any troubles. Whereas on most things the trackball is much easier and faster.
I still use the SAME trackball. An original trackman marble from Logitec that cost $75 or so at the time. Over three years ago IIRC. The thing has outlasted most any other pointing device I've ever owned by a factor of at least 4 if not 5 or 6.
I'm not suprised your trackball player has high accuracy. Think about how a trackball is moved vs a mouse. The mouse requires the slopier and more tireing motions of at least the lower arm/wrist muscles (and lots of people use the whole arm) and the whole pick up and move back to continue sequence that results in wasted time and a need for tiny correction as picking up and setting down a mouse usually move the ball a bit.
Mycroft
hmm Or dance dance revolver.
Mycroft
errr, it's a light gun, it's tethered to the fact that it HAS to point to the screen to read which pixel it's pointed at, and you're limited in distance based on how well it's optics can determine which point on the screen it's pointed at.
I suspect this will be more of an issue than tilt and bluetooth won't help that much.
This is kinda like fixing battery life in electric cars by using extension cords.
Mycroft
I wasn't working from numbers I had and mistakenly assumed you were working from ideals. My fault there.
That said I Know from a case where I had a purely mechanical failure stop an alternator (belt went, not slipped for a while then went, it was nearly new, rock or something hit it and sliced it). The battery was about 3 months old, and it was about this time of year.
I've heard simular time frames from friends and relatives. All anectedotal, but no 'hours' or even a full hour like some here are claiming.
Mycroft
Netscape 3.0gold was my favorite back in the day.
Never really cared for IE just kinda got used to it on windows for a while till I got a decent ver of FF (.8 IIRC).
Can't say I blame some people for using ns3. FWIW my uncle (who's partly responsible for my early days in computers) refuses to budge from win3.1 + NS3.0.
Mycroft
I've been on the web (almost said online, that goes back even farther) and internet since late 95, seems to me it's gotten less useable and readable, not more.
I used to be able to read a site without having to play games with the screen resolutions and font sizes and still wasting 1/3 of the horizontal resolution of my monitor for starters.
On the rare site that didn't work (usually a bad link where / and \ got confused or an obvious misspelling such as htm for html or vice versa) a quick glance at the underlying html almost always revealed the problem and suggested the solution.
Now you've got how many 'standards' do define a web page and what kinda useless unreadable crap is the result?
Mycroft
Actually I don't have a problem with it if they lost a few early tries at manned space flight (unless it was through obvious at the time stupidity). Those are the risks in that sort of effort.
What would bother me is that they would hide thier heros like that. That's the shamefull thing to my mind. These guys would have knowingly taken a very high risk only to be deliberately hidden from thier proper places in history.
People like that should be honored, not swept under the carpet.
Mycroft
LOL I remember that show. One episode opened with them dissarming a nuke in some room, sledge says trust me I know what I'm doing. They pan out to a mushroom cloud and then the story proper starts with the subtitle 5 years earlier. :)
Always thought that was a bad move limiting the series to just 5 more years, but it never made it anyway.
Mycroft
Interesting, but all that is just a first approximation.
IF your car was brand new and had superconduting wires and no other draws on it's power and the battery was an ideal battery (perfect discharge till zero then nothing at all) you might get your 38 minutes.
Reality adds in line losses, the fact that a car battery is NOT designed to be used that way and all the side items the system has to power all add up to mean you'll get less than half that durring the day, and a LOT less at night.
Mycroft