maybe I'm wrong, but I can remember a couple of episodes where SG-1 uses the gates on a moving Ga'uld ship to go from Earth to ship and blow things up. Remember the episode from way back when they gate to an incoming Ga'uld fleet that was going to attack Earth? There were a couple other episodes like that, I think.
Actually, you can have three gates on one planet. Does anyone remember the episode where the mysterious alien built his own Stargate in Major Carter's basement out of spare parts so he could get back and stop the military from turning on some kind of ancient superweapon on his dead planet? At that point, it would have been the US gate, the Russian gate and the alien's gate. I wished they'd explored that arc more, in that building one's own Stargate isn't that difficult with the right parts. (The alien was a super genius but all of the stuff he used to build his gate he ordered mail order using Major Carter's credit card. Even though his gate shorted out after one use, it didn't blow up or melt so the military should have been able to figure out how he built it.)
I think this is a great idea. I hate it when I go out and then ready to go home and have to worry if I'm over the legal percentage or not. (I stop drinking an hour or so before I leave a party, etc. but I still am insecure about eactly when my blood/alcohal level has become legal.)
Another idea might be for restaurants to have breath analyzers at the door. When you leave you check to see if you were legal to drive or not. Although, as the effect of alcohal is to impair thinking, the idea of having the car itself not start is better.
I am in most cases a complete libertarian who hates any invasion of privacy, government monitoring, etc. However, drunk driving is a horrible scourge in society that we have to wipe people's judgement. i.e. the law abiding person who would never something so stupid has that part of his brain turned off my two much booze, drives home and kills a kid.
I am against the part that constantly requires retesting as you are driving. That seems too much and very bothersome. Those people who would get drunk and deliberately try to get around this system and so evil anyway I'm sure they'd find another trick.
true, but in America it isn't official policy supposedly based on the word of God to treat women like animals. In this country, it is the pefect right of someone to be a hard core Chrisitan fundamentalist male chauvinist. However, this person can not use these values in the work place or in society beyond a certain limit without being sued or arrested.
You are actually not correct... there is friction in space from random molecules, dust. etc. At the speeds we can presently reach, this friction does not matter. However, if something starts moving near lightspeed, those small impacts become significant. In fact, the Bussard Ramjet is designed to use just these random molecules as fuel. The site "http://www.itsf.org/brochure/ramscoop.html"
describes such a ship far better than I can as follows
"The ramjet or ram scoop is a device that uses a powerful magnetic field to collect interstellar hydrogen during flight. The greater the speed, the more efficient the collection will be."
"The Bussard ramjet was proposed by R.W. Bussard in 1960. The original vehicle collects charged particles from interstellar space using a large magnetic scoop, and funnels them to the onboard H-He fusion reactor, where they are converted to fuel. According to Bussard's calculations, a 1000 ton starship with a 100% reactor efficiency, which collects fuel from a medium with 1 charged nucleon/cubic centimetre would accelerate almost indefinitely at 1g. In a year the craft would reach the speed of light and in the subjective lifetime of the crew it would also reach the end of the Universe. The diameter of the scoop would need to be 100 km for this 1000 ton vehicle, if it is to move through a space medium with a density of 1000 atoms/cm3."
"The top speed of a Bussard ramjet is theoretically very close to the speed of light, but practically it may be hindered by the density of interstellar matter, the drag of the magnetic field and the braking of the incoming protons. The advantage of Bussard ramjets is that they do not need to bring fuel along with them. The downside is that the ramjet will not work from a standstill, but needs a velocity of 4-6% of the speed of light to get the right flux of charged particles to work."
I'm not an engineer, just a hard SF fan who likes to read up future technologies. I can't argue the fine points of the possibility of actually constructing operating a ship like this...
I partly agree that the internet is taking over the way in which I acquire information.
I never read newspaper anymore nor watch the TV news. I can go to cnn.com or google news and take in everything I need to know about what happened that day, i.e. scandal in Washington, explosion in Middle East, etc. I can come by slashdot for what's new in technology then hit f***ckedcompany to see if I still have a job.
For pr0n, the net is a godsend. I not a pr0n maniac but like to check out naked chicks every now and then. However, there is nothing that is more demeaning and just gross than buying a pr0n mag at the store. It is like saying to the whole world, "hey, I'm a lonely loser with no life". Rather than casually checking out a web-site, when you buy a Penthouse you're deliberately deciding to publicly spend money on smut.
For research purposes, the library just seems useless. I can find info about any obscure topic I want on-line in a matter of minutes. One has to be very careful about absorbing bullshit but cross checking and common sense usually weed out most of the nonsense for me.
However, I still do read actual paper magazines like the Economist, Fortune or Foreign Affairs. The quality of the analysis and journalism out way the lack of timeliness for these and certain other publications. These all have web versions, but for serious reading and absorption, electronic media can not (yet) beat out paper, at least in my opinion.
As for books and literature, there's no way a CRT can replace a book yet. You can't take CRT into the can or sit on the couch or train with it. A small laptop could work, but it just isn't the same. There really isn't a logical reason for this and it is not related to the quality of the image.
Well, LOTR made a billion dollars in theater ticket sales world-wide(per Google). That more than made a profit for them as the production cost was ~100 million dollars (per Google). For movies, the social experience of going to the theater will always be better than watching at home. The Filipinos I know both immediately buy the pirate copy on the street AND will also go the theater to enjoy the experience. As for sales of non-pirated DVD's, I think that, unless the price goes way down, the market is doomed.
It might mean that the quality of movies goes down for a few years until they can offer fantastic special effects with a 50 cent per copy price for the DVD release. Maybe not, though, as super high payed actors might be replaced by CGI characters. Look at how good Gollum was; imagine in 20 years with better technology. High tech special effect rendering could be done in cheap places like the Philippines or India or even Africa when they sort themselves out. Anyway, at the profit rate LOTR made from just ticket sales, they don't have to worry.
(On a side note, we might see the big actors of today licensing their likenesses as for CGI, meaning that your grand-kids will be watching T34 with Arnold in all his glory. There might not be new faces in the movie business in the future, just the same 20th and early 21st century actors over and over again. Imagine Bogart, Arnold and Audry Hepburn in a movie...)
The basic issue is that music and DVDs are not worth 20+ dollars anymore when everyone know that blank CD's cost less than a couple of cents, if that.
In the Philippines, file sharing is not that popular because it is actually cheaper and more convenient to buy the excellently pirated and reproduced media (complete with liner notes, etc.) from the old women in the market than to deal with Kazaa, etc. (bandwidth isn't really an issue, for people who can afford PCs, affording broad band is not a problem.)
If the record and movie industry's were to sell there product at the same price as the pirates (or a little more with the guarantee of quality) they would beat the inconvenience of file sharing very easily. They just can not accept that the days of overcharging consumers are over. Every Filipino gets with a CD player has all the Brittany, Madonna, CDs etc. he or she wants. (sorry, that's what they're into...)
You can already get perfect DVDs of Terminator 3 Charlie's Angels on the street, not badly done copies made by some guy with a camera but real copies. Friends of mine send me these everynow and then (no... I won't sell them here. Jail isn't fun.)
My point is that the record industry should learn from this example, that millions of people are willing to pay money for CDs and DVDs instead of downloading when the prices are reasonable.
Likely, the won't learn though. Now, every few months, the record industry pressures the State Department to enforce copy protection laws in the Philippines. The local authorities dutifully bulldozer some CDs from the market place.
What isn't mentioned is that the same authorities worked it out with the merchants the night before, saying that they have to put a show on for some stupid Americans at such and such a time and place and could the merchants have some old, defective or otherwise unsellable stuff ready for smashing on the evening news...
I have Hotmail and never get any spam. I use a feature called the "white list" hidden deep in the Hotmail preferences menu. Any e-mail addresses I have not specifically added to the list go to the trash folder. Even internal messages/spam from Hotmail itself go to the trash. When the number of e-mails in the trash folder goes over 250 or so, the oldest ones autodelete. Every now and then I check the trash to see if a real e-mail is in it. This has never happened. When I register for stuff on-line, the confirmation e-mails go to the top of the trash folder. I move these to the inbox right away. I have about 70 addresses added to my "white list" at present. It is a pleasure not having to wade through spam anymore. Sometimes I actually read the spam in the trash folder. As I know it is spam and know it will autodelete, it is no longer annoying but just kind of amusing.
Especially great when the FBI comes breaking through door and you have to explain to Mulder and Scully about how you really didn't know about the 5 gigs of Japanese pre-teen toilet porn on your hard-drive...
It might be contrarian and will surely be flamed into ash, but I actually agree with the policy. A wide open forum such as e-Bay is a perfect way for terrorists to communicate un-seen, even easier that Hotmail or Yahoo free mail and harder to monitor.
Obscure auctions in odd corners of the site could be no-more than coded back and forth communication, i.e. a final bid for 9 super fuzzy furbies in the 11 box set... it sounds far fetched but not when one thinks about it. The Russians call this maskirovka, or "hiding in the light".
I guess what they are doing is protecting themselves in case it is revealed something like the above happens. They can can say to press, well, we have this policy, etc. but as no-one in law enforcement alerted us to look at such and such an auction how could we have known? Imagine the fall-out for e-Bay if terrorists used the system and it turned out e-Bay had been refusing info to the CIA.
With bio-weapons, nukes, dirty bombs, etc. terrorism is now so potentially devasting that old fashioned notions of privacy, etc. just do not work anymore, sadly. I hate that our liberties are being eroded but I can not see any other way to fight terrorism.
I keep a hotmail account (I know it is lame, but I've had it from the time when hotmail was not lame...). Buried deep within the settings is the option to "white list". With this option everything that is not specifically allowed is sent to the junk mail folder. I told it to allow my family and friends and co-workers e-mail. Every day or so I go through the junk folder just to make sure nothing valid got sent into it. Once junk mails hit 100 or so e-mails, hotmail erases the oldest so that the system is self maintaining. This is a fantastic solution to the spam problem. Before I used to a 100 spams a day or more. With this system, over the past three ones, only one spam somehow managed to slip in.
This was an above average show. I liked how the aliens were not sweet and good but have a dark agenda of some kind. I also like how they use their magic powers to trick girls into the hayloft and, once the girl is knocked up, disappear in flash of light. No ET here!! More like shore leave in Thailand.
I was really worried it would turn into this other show that was on Fox a while back (I forget the title) where an abductee steels a flying saucer, escapes back to Earth and gets shot down by the Airforce (so far, deeply cool). Then, to my utter dismay, the abductee grows long hair and goes around healing plants. I was hoping the Airforce would debrief him, take the alien technology and then go and abduct some greys. One can only dream.
"Taken", though, is pretty solid so far, not great, but definitely the reason I have a Tivo. It doesn't get too smary (other than that annoying sweet child narration [this worries me -- I hope the child turns out to really evil or something])
I write very basic Visual Basic scripts to automate the transcrition process for a large hospital. Miscosoft Word is completely insecure.
Every Word document can contain one or more large complete applications that can interact with the internet, the network, a user's computer etc.
Even with my very limited and basic knowledge I could (and have) accomplished the above. Every transcribed document in my department of this hospital is full of my code.
If I was a certain type of person, the danger to patient privacy and confidentiality would be immense. I'm not like that but the idea that companies, hospital and governments world-wide use use Word on a daily basis is rather unsettling.
I can only image the explots that someone who A) really knew what they were doing and B) lacked ethical standards could accomplish.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Japan has the 6th or 7th most powerful military in the world. They're just really really quiet about it and call it a "Self Defense Force"
maybe I'm wrong, but I can remember a couple of episodes where SG-1 uses the gates on a moving Ga'uld ship to go from Earth to ship and blow things up. Remember the episode from way back when they gate to an incoming Ga'uld fleet that was going to attack Earth? There were a couple other episodes like that, I think.
Actually, you can have three gates on one planet. Does anyone remember the episode where the mysterious alien built his own Stargate in Major Carter's basement out of spare parts so he could get back and stop the military from turning on some kind of ancient superweapon on his dead planet? At that point, it would have been the US gate, the Russian gate and the alien's gate. I wished they'd explored that arc more, in that building one's own Stargate isn't that difficult with the right parts. (The alien was a super genius but all of the stuff he used to build his gate he ordered mail order using Major Carter's credit card. Even though his gate shorted out after one use, it didn't blow up or melt so the military should have been able to figure out how he built it.)
Another idea might be for restaurants to have breath analyzers at the door. When you leave you check to see if you were legal to drive or not. Although, as the effect of alcohal is to impair thinking, the idea of having the car itself not start is better.
I am in most cases a complete libertarian who hates any invasion of privacy, government monitoring, etc. However, drunk driving is a horrible scourge in society that we have to wipe people's judgement. i.e. the law abiding person who would never something so stupid has that part of his brain turned off my two much booze, drives home and kills a kid.
I am against the part that constantly requires retesting as you are driving. That seems too much and very bothersome. Those people who would get drunk and deliberately try to get around this system and so evil anyway I'm sure they'd find another trick.
true, but in America it isn't official policy supposedly based on the word of God to treat women like animals. In this country, it is the pefect right of someone to be a hard core Chrisitan fundamentalist male chauvinist. However, this person can not use these values in the work place or in society beyond a certain limit without being sued or arrested.
not sure why this is marked "troll". the guy seems to make some vlaid points and observations. can't blame him for being pissed.
"The ramjet or ram scoop is a device that uses a powerful magnetic field to collect interstellar hydrogen during flight. The greater the speed, the more efficient the collection will be."
"The Bussard ramjet was proposed by R.W. Bussard in 1960. The original vehicle collects charged particles from interstellar space using a large magnetic scoop, and funnels them to the onboard H-He fusion reactor, where they are converted to fuel. According to Bussard's calculations, a 1000 ton starship with a 100% reactor efficiency, which collects fuel from a medium with 1 charged nucleon/cubic centimetre would accelerate almost indefinitely at 1g. In a year the craft would reach the speed of light and in the subjective lifetime of the crew it would also reach the end of the Universe. The diameter of the scoop would need to be 100 km for this 1000 ton vehicle, if it is to move through a space medium with a density of 1000 atoms/cm3."
"The top speed of a Bussard ramjet is theoretically very close to the speed of light, but practically it may be hindered by the density of interstellar matter, the drag of the magnetic field and the braking of the incoming protons. The advantage of Bussard ramjets is that they do not need to bring fuel along with them. The downside is that the ramjet will not work from a standstill, but needs a velocity of 4-6% of the speed of light to get the right flux of charged particles to work."
I'm not an engineer, just a hard SF fan who likes to read up future technologies. I can't argue the fine points of the possibility of actually constructing operating a ship like this ...
I never read newspaper anymore nor watch the TV news. I can go to cnn.com or google news and take in everything I need to know about what happened that day, i.e. scandal in Washington, explosion in Middle East, etc. I can come by slashdot for what's new in technology then hit f***ckedcompany to see if I still have a job.
For pr0n, the net is a godsend. I not a pr0n maniac but like to check out naked chicks every now and then. However, there is nothing that is more demeaning and just gross than buying a pr0n mag at the store. It is like saying to the whole world, "hey, I'm a lonely loser with no life". Rather than casually checking out a web-site, when you buy a Penthouse you're deliberately deciding to publicly spend money on smut.
For research purposes, the library just seems useless. I can find info about any obscure topic I want on-line in a matter of minutes. One has to be very careful about absorbing bullshit but cross checking and common sense usually weed out most of the nonsense for me.
However, I still do read actual paper magazines like the Economist, Fortune or Foreign Affairs. The quality of the analysis and journalism out way the lack of timeliness for these and certain other publications. These all have web versions, but for serious reading and absorption, electronic media can not (yet) beat out paper, at least in my opinion.
As for books and literature, there's no way a CRT can replace a book yet. You can't take CRT into the can or sit on the couch or train with it. A small laptop could work, but it just isn't the same. There really isn't a logical reason for this and it is not related to the quality of the image.
Well, LOTR made a billion dollars in theater ticket sales world-wide(per Google). That more than made a profit for them as the production cost was ~100 million dollars (per Google). For movies, the social experience of going to the theater will always be better than watching at home. The Filipinos I know both immediately buy the pirate copy on the street AND will also go the theater to enjoy the experience. As for sales of non-pirated DVD's, I think that, unless the price goes way down, the market is doomed.
...)
It might mean that the quality of movies goes down for a few years until they can offer fantastic special effects with a 50 cent per copy price for the DVD release. Maybe not, though, as super high payed actors might be replaced by CGI characters. Look at how good Gollum was; imagine in 20 years with better technology. High tech special effect rendering could be done in cheap places like the Philippines or India or even Africa when they sort themselves out. Anyway, at the profit rate LOTR made from just ticket sales, they don't have to worry.
(On a side note, we might see the big actors of today licensing their likenesses as for CGI, meaning that your grand-kids will be watching T34 with Arnold in all his glory. There might not be new faces in the movie business in the future, just the same 20th and early 21st century actors over and over again. Imagine Bogart, Arnold and Audry Hepburn in a movie
sorry for the bold type. I stupidly misformatted my posting ...
The basic issue is that music and DVDs are not worth 20+ dollars anymore when everyone know that blank CD's cost less than a couple of cents, if that. In the Philippines, file sharing is not that popular because it is actually cheaper and more convenient to buy the excellently pirated and reproduced media (complete with liner notes, etc.) from the old women in the market than to deal with Kazaa, etc. (bandwidth isn't really an issue, for people who can afford PCs, affording broad band is not a problem.) If the record and movie industry's were to sell there product at the same price as the pirates (or a little more with the guarantee of quality) they would beat the inconvenience of file sharing very easily. They just can not accept that the days of overcharging consumers are over. Every Filipino gets with a CD player has all the Brittany, Madonna, CDs etc. he or she wants. (sorry, that's what they're into ...)
You can already get perfect DVDs of Terminator 3 Charlie's Angels on the street, not badly done copies made by some guy with a camera but real copies. Friends of mine send me these everynow and then (no ... I won't sell them here. Jail isn't fun.)
My point is that the record industry should learn from this example, that millions of people are willing to pay money for CDs and DVDs instead of downloading when the prices are reasonable.
Likely, the won't learn though. Now, every few months, the record industry pressures the State Department to enforce copy protection laws in the Philippines. The local authorities dutifully bulldozer some CDs from the market place.
What isn't mentioned is that the same authorities worked it out with the merchants the night before, saying that they have to put a show on for some stupid Americans at such and such a time and place and could the merchants have some old, defective or otherwise unsellable stuff ready for smashing on the evening news...
I have Hotmail and never get any spam. I use a feature called the "white list" hidden deep in the Hotmail preferences menu. Any e-mail addresses I have not specifically added to the list go to the trash folder. Even internal messages/spam from Hotmail itself go to the trash. When the number of e-mails in the trash folder goes over 250 or so, the oldest ones autodelete. Every now and then I check the trash to see if a real e-mail is in it. This has never happened. When I register for stuff on-line, the confirmation e-mails go to the top of the trash folder. I move these to the inbox right away. I have about 70 addresses added to my "white list" at present. It is a pleasure not having to wade through spam anymore. Sometimes I actually read the spam in the trash folder. As I know it is spam and know it will autodelete, it is no longer annoying but just kind of amusing.
Especially great when the FBI comes breaking through door and you have to explain to Mulder and Scully about how you really didn't know about the 5 gigs of Japanese pre-teen toilet porn on your hard-drive ...
It might be contrarian and will surely be flamed into ash, but I actually agree with the policy. A wide open forum such as e-Bay is a perfect way for terrorists to communicate un-seen, even easier that Hotmail or Yahoo free mail and harder to monitor. Obscure auctions in odd corners of the site could be no-more than coded back and forth communication, i.e. a final bid for 9 super fuzzy furbies in the 11 box set ... it sounds far fetched but not when one thinks about it. The Russians call this maskirovka, or "hiding in the light".
I guess what they are doing is protecting themselves in case it is revealed something like the above happens. They can can say to press, well, we have this policy, etc. but as no-one in law enforcement alerted us to look at such and such an auction how could we have known? Imagine the fall-out for e-Bay if terrorists used the system and it turned out e-Bay had been refusing info to the CIA.
With bio-weapons, nukes, dirty bombs, etc. terrorism is now so potentially devasting that old fashioned notions of privacy, etc. just do not work anymore, sadly. I hate that our liberties are being eroded but I can not see any other way to fight terrorism.
I keep a hotmail account (I know it is lame, but I've had it from the time when hotmail was not lame ...). Buried deep within the settings is the option to "white list". With this option everything that is not specifically allowed is sent to the junk mail folder. I told it to allow my family and friends and co-workers e-mail. Every day or so I go through the junk folder just to make sure nothing valid got sent into it. Once junk mails hit 100 or so e-mails, hotmail erases the oldest so that the system is self maintaining. This is a fantastic solution to the spam problem. Before I used to a 100 spams a day or more. With this system, over the past three ones, only one spam somehow managed to slip in.
This was an above average show. I liked how the aliens were not sweet and good but have a dark agenda of some kind. I also like how they use their magic powers to trick girls into the hayloft and, once the girl is knocked up, disappear in flash of light. No ET here!! More like shore leave in Thailand. I was really worried it would turn into this other show that was on Fox a while back (I forget the title) where an abductee steels a flying saucer, escapes back to Earth and gets shot down by the Airforce (so far, deeply cool). Then, to my utter dismay, the abductee grows long hair and goes around healing plants. I was hoping the Airforce would debrief him, take the alien technology and then go and abduct some greys. One can only dream. "Taken", though, is pretty solid so far, not great, but definitely the reason I have a Tivo. It doesn't get too smary (other than that annoying sweet child narration [this worries me -- I hope the child turns out to really evil or something])
I write very basic Visual Basic scripts to automate the transcrition process for a large hospital. Miscosoft Word is completely insecure. Every Word document can contain one or more large complete applications that can interact with the internet, the network, a user's computer etc. Even with my very limited and basic knowledge I could (and have) accomplished the above. Every transcribed document in my department of this hospital is full of my code. If I was a certain type of person, the danger to patient privacy and confidentiality would be immense. I'm not like that but the idea that companies, hospital and governments world-wide use use Word on a daily basis is rather unsettling. I can only image the explots that someone who A) really knew what they were doing and B) lacked ethical standards could accomplish.