What homeland security paranoia? That first flight happened before 9/11/2001 & therefore before (most) of our heightened paranoia. What they encountered was on the then-normal paranoia at the "longest undefended international border in the world."
Calling in Homeland Security would be a nightmare. We've had enough problems with the invasion of Iraq; it's just a little, tiny, country. Can you imagine how bad the invasion of Canada would be? Even if we only invaded Vancouver to get this guy, I'm sure we'd have to deal with the rest of the country.
Does Homeland Security have troops, or would they have to subcontract to the DoD? OTOH, maybe this would be the perfect time to expand outsourcing to China; I hear they have a large military....
That's an interesting semantic distinction. If you'd read the JPL link I provided (and even the quote in my post) you'd find that Voyagers weren't "planned" to go to Uranus & Neptune, but WENT THERE ANYWAY.
Your point that I was responding to was that we didn't know for sure if Neptune is a gas giant because we had no missions to Neptune. My point was 1) we knew that anyway, based on earth-based observations, and 2) we did have a mission to Neptune. Are you now saying that we can't count science gathered at Neptune by Voyager because that wasn't the only place it was going? Makes no sense.
Both Voyagers were planned on being Jupiter/Saturn missions only because of the expense, and because we didn't know how long they'd last. They always had the possibility of going on to the other gas giants, and the missions were planned with that in mind. They were able to do so because of the success of the Jupiter & Saturn flybys.
Why bother Googling? You want to know about NASA missions, http://www.nasa.gov/ seems like a logical choice...
Single rocket engine. Jet engines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_engine) don't work without an external source of oxygen. Which doesn't exist on the moon.
Rocket engines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_engine) on the other hand, carry all of the requriements of combustion as fuel, and therefore don't need an atmosphere. Which doesn't exist on the moon.
Haven't done any missions to Neptune? I seem to remember being in the Air & Space Museum in August of 1989 when we received the first pictures from Voyager 2 at Neptune; they had a little printer there & were handing out copies. BTW, this was 3 years after V2 had passed by Uranus, yet anOTHER gas giant in the solar system.
Anyway, try looking at http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/science/planetary.html. You'll find something along the lines of "...the additional flybys of the two outermost giant planets, Uranus and Neptune, proved possible...."
As for Neptune being "...supposedly a Gas Giant...." we knew that *before* we got there. Apparently, we can do wonderful calculations of mass & size based on earth-based observations of planetary bodies & their effects on other solar system objects.
2) The US government stepped in and broke up their [IBM] monopoly.
You are misinformed. The US government dropped the case in 1982. No monopoly decision was even reached, so there was obviously no break up of IBM forced by the courts.
Sure they were -- some of them. Remember that "Nazi" is the name of a political party. Just as some Nazis (probably most, given German culture of the time) were Christians, some were not. Same as "not all Germans were Nazis".
Now, as to the difference between believing someone who says "I'm a Christian" and evaluating the actions of said person & determining what they *really* believe, that's a different matter.
You were clear enough, or I guessed right. Either way, it'd be better if I thought you *had* expressed that as your opinion, instead of quoting someone supposedly knowledgeable. Flaming you (which was not and is not my intent) could have been more fun.
Instead, it's just sad. Some scientist who studies insects makes blanket statements like "mosquitos are useless" (yeah, I know I'm paraphrasing). When he-or-she should know enough to know that those kind of statements are dangerous. And flat-out wrong.
So are flies (except for the parasite part). Anyone want to suggest we get rid of all the flies and then deal with the resulting buildup of dead carcasses due to lack of maggots?
Heck, I don't know if female mosquitos perform any useful function besides being bat food & bird food -- maybe they don't. But I *like* bats & birds.:-) Oh, wait -- female mosquitos are necessary for producing more male mosquitos, right? Guess what -- male mosquitos eat, among other things, nectar, and they don't suck blood. I don't know, but here's a guess -- maybe there's some pollination going on during feeding?
I just learned (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito) that there's even a species of mosquito that feeds on *other mosquitos' larvae*, and doesn't suck blood. What happens to the harmful mosquito population when we wipe those out, 'cause our stupid little robots don't know the difference?
My problem is with statements like "...consequenses would certainly be local....". How do we know that? What's Dr. Malcom's line in Jurassic Park? Something like "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." Or maybe "The lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here, uh... staggers me."
One argument is that mosquitoes have no ecological benefit...most if not all birds' diets can consist of other insect larvae and other adult insects.
All right. This is a religious issue, and I'm stupid to reply to it (and it's off topic, and I'm gonna kill my karma) but I'm going to do so anyway.
How on earth does anyone (and I'm not blaming the statement on you, Linuxathome) think they know enough to make a statement like this? I don't know much of anything about mosquitos' ecological niches (please note the plural, folks) but I can easily come up with several problems with the statements above.
Say some bird (or bat, or whatever else -- many other things eat mosquitos besides birds) stops eating mosquitos, and starts eating more of some other insect. Said insect's decline now causes some other consumer to eat something else (say, for argument's sake, bees). Now flowers aren't being pollinated, honey isn't being produced, cats and dogs start living together...you get the idea. We're talking biblical proportions here, folks.
I'm all for reducing disease (btw, there are lots of diseases borne by things other than misquitos) but let's not get too arrogant about our ability to describe how the world "works" in little soundbite descriptions.
Being Lotus Notes ignorant, I have to ask -- does Notes use some feature of IE under the covers? I ask, because my wife is a teacher & her school also uses Notes. I know she starts Notes as a separate app, and the default browser they configure on the school computers is Netscape, not IE.
She also uses Firefox or Netscape at home to read her email; I don't know if she can delete or not, though. And I'm not going to wake her up just to ask.:-)
You forgot the ridiculous "action" sequences like surviving a fall from an airplane in a life raft, and the roller coaster mine railroad. Granted, a lot of the action in 1 & 3 were unrealistic, but at least they *felt* plausible.
"Temple of Doom" was beyond terrible. They only thing it had going for it was "Club Obi Wan"
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium: "...the concentration of helium in the Earth's atmosphere is only 1 part in 200,000, largely because most helium in the Earth's atmosphere escapes into space due to its inertness and low mass."
Well, it's just been conclusively demonstrated that a lot more people in the US admire Bush than not.
BZZZT. Thanks for playing, but next time bring your thinking cap with you.
Maybe: "...more people who voted in the US...."
Or: "...admire Bush than the other alternatives presented in the election."
How you get from "voted for" to "admire" is beyond me, too. But that's a different topic. Also, I won't even think about getting into the tinfoil hat possibility of "...more voting machine programmers admire....":-)
I voted this morning in a punch card state (Missouri) and I had *no* problem verifying my votes. Each choice has a unique number (printed on both the ballot & the punch card) and it was trivial to pull my card out of the machine, flip back through the ballot pages, and verify that the chad was gone from the right #s.
After I did that, *I* put the card in the (locked) collections box. I have a reasonable confidence that A) my card will be read correctly by the tabulating machine; and B) it will still be available should a recount be necessary.
Now, explain to me how a touchscreen provides anything "far easier" (and more accurate) than that?
I've bought the theatrical release of all 3, have bought the EE for the first two, and will have the RotK EE long before the end of the year. I wanted to be able to see both the released movies in the future and the additional scenes & features on the EEs.
For the record, I've been reading Tolkien since Jr. High (early 70s), have 4 kids, a granddaughter, and a grandson on the way.
Oh, yeah. My wife, who's never read any Tolkein and is clearly not *any* kind of geek, has been to all 3 movies with me. On opening day....
Most PC's dont use SCSI. Like I originally stated, you can't expect the same from PCs and server hardware
Well, I wasn't talking about most PCs. I was responding to your...These features will probably NEVER be included on any x86 type box.... statement. My experience isn't mostly with desktop PCs; it's with servers. I'm sure we have some piece of x86 HW in our data centers somewhere without SCSI, but it'd be tough finding it in the thousands of systems with hot-swap SCSI disks.
I guess my point is that there are differences between x86 servers and PCs. And apparently, you don't know anything about real x86 servers. Would I rather have a HW/OS combination designed together for *really, really* important apps? Sure, because it'd be worth paying for. But that doesn't change the fact that 2 out of the 3 features you said would probably never exist on x86 already do.
...hotswap memory, hard drives and even CPUs the way Sun servers can. These features will probably NEVER be included on any x86 type box because if you need those features, then x86 is the wrong architecture for the job.
Uh, x86 SCSI controllers have been able to hot-swap hard drives for years. Has nothing to do with being x86 architecture, either.
To argue further, both HP (DL760) and IBM (x445) have hot-swap memory. Some Unisys & Dell models probably do, too; I'm just to lazy to check right now. I also keep hearing my vendors tell me they're working on hot-swap CPUs. I'll believe it when I see it but I don't suspect they're totally lying to me; I think they do think it's possible. Probably already works part/most of the time in the lab.
I don't know about 99% uptime & Sun HW, though; Sun is using more & more "off-the-shelf" components itself these days. I know we continue to have HW problems on *all* of our equipment, and we have a lot of Sun. The bigger advantage for Sun/Solaris (or HP/HP-UX, or IBM/AIX) is that the HW & SW are designed together, to interact. We don't have that yet with Linux, although it's going to be interesting to watch IBM with Linux on POWER over the next couple of years.
I do agree with you that "different tools, different jobs" is the right philosophy. We need to get out of the "if it's right for me, it must be right for you" mode that seems to be soooo prevalent these days.
I heard a story several years ago on NPR about a special group in France that gets called whenever someone (typically farmers) find unexploded ordnance. They get called several times a year, and find stuff from both World Wars as well as, occasionally, the Franco-Prussian War. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War
Wouldn't that information be better contained in a good PIM on a laptop system? Yes, if you can A) carry the laptop in your shirt pocket; and B) get the information within 5 seconds (and that *includes* getting the device out of your pocket.
I wouldn't trust any important data to a PDA. Too fragile... That's what syncing to your computer is for. Also, backing up to the removable memory in your PDA. I have a complete backup on my laptop (files copied to another workstation) and I have another on a memory stick. ...I can't easily remove the hard drive and recover the data with another system. What's your point? If the hard drive in your computer dies, "easy" recovery isn't possible there, either. In the case either of a PDA or a computer, you have to think about what might go wrong and take appropriate measures; backups should be part of your strategy if the information is important.
As for "fragile", don't get me started. Thanks to certain brain-dead policies at work, I've gone through 7 different laptops in the last year. In seven years, I've used three PDAs, and only one actually died.
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What homeland security paranoia? That first flight happened before 9/11/2001 & therefore before (most) of our heightened paranoia. What they encountered was on the then-normal paranoia at the "longest undefended international border in the world."
This is insightful? Funny, maybe, in a sad way.
Calling in Homeland Security would be a nightmare. We've had enough problems with the invasion of Iraq; it's just a little, tiny, country. Can you imagine how bad the invasion of Canada would be? Even if we only invaded Vancouver to get this guy, I'm sure we'd have to deal with the rest of the country.
Does Homeland Security have troops, or would they have to subcontract to the DoD? OTOH, maybe this would be the perfect time to expand outsourcing to China; I hear they have a large military....
That's an interesting semantic distinction. If you'd read the JPL link I provided (and even the quote in my post) you'd find that Voyagers weren't "planned" to go to Uranus & Neptune, but WENT THERE ANYWAY.
Your point that I was responding to was that we didn't know for sure if Neptune is a gas giant because we had no missions to Neptune. My point was 1) we knew that anyway, based on earth-based observations, and 2) we did have a mission to Neptune. Are you now saying that we can't count science gathered at Neptune by Voyager because that wasn't the only place it was going? Makes no sense.
Both Voyagers were planned on being Jupiter/Saturn missions only because of the expense, and because we didn't know how long they'd last. They always had the possibility of going on to the other gas giants, and the missions were planned with that in mind. They were able to do so because of the success of the Jupiter & Saturn flybys.
Why bother Googling? You want to know about NASA missions, http://www.nasa.gov/ seems like a logical choice...
...jet engines....
Single rocket engine. Jet engines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_engine) don't work without an external source of oxygen. Which doesn't exist on the moon.
Rocket engines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_engine) on the other hand, carry all of the requriements of combustion as fuel, and therefore don't need an atmosphere. Which doesn't exist on the moon.
Haven't done any missions to Neptune? I seem to remember being in the Air & Space Museum in August of 1989 when we received the first pictures from Voyager 2 at Neptune; they had a little printer there & were handing out copies. BTW, this was 3 years after V2 had passed by Uranus, yet anOTHER gas giant in the solar system.
l . You'll find something along the lines of "...the additional flybys of the two outermost giant planets, Uranus and Neptune, proved possible...."
n e.html, 13 known moons. Probably a lot more....
Anyway, try looking at http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/science/planetary.htm
As for Neptune being "...supposedly a Gas Giant...." we knew that *before* we got there. Apparently, we can do wonderful calculations of mass & size based on earth-based observations of planetary bodies & their effects on other solar system objects.
Oh, and according to http://www.astro.uio.no/ita/TNP/nineplanets/neptu
2) The US government stepped in and broke up their [IBM] monopoly.
You are misinformed. The US government dropped the case in 1982. No monopoly decision was even reached, so there was obviously no break up of IBM forced by the courts.
See http://www.hagley.lib.de.us/1980.htm.
Maybe you were thinking of the US governement case against AT&T, which did result in a forced breakup? It did take place in the same time frame....
The Nazis weren't Christians.
Sure they were -- some of them. Remember that "Nazi" is the name of a political party. Just as some Nazis (probably most, given German culture of the time) were Christians, some were not. Same as "not all Germans were Nazis".
Now, as to the difference between believing someone who says "I'm a Christian" and evaluating the actions of said person & determining what they *really* believe, that's a different matter.
You were clear enough, or I guessed right. Either way, it'd be better if I thought you *had* expressed that as your opinion, instead of quoting someone supposedly knowledgeable. Flaming you (which was not and is not my intent) could have been more fun.
Instead, it's just sad. Some scientist who studies insects makes blanket statements like "mosquitos are useless" (yeah, I know I'm paraphrasing). When he-or-she should know enough to know that those kind of statements are dangerous. And flat-out wrong.
...mosquitos are annoying, disease-ridden....
:-) Oh, wait -- female mosquitos are necessary for producing more male mosquitos, right? Guess what -- male mosquitos eat, among other things, nectar, and they don't suck blood. I don't know, but here's a guess -- maybe there's some pollination going on during feeding?
So are flies (except for the parasite part). Anyone want to suggest we get rid of all the flies and then deal with the resulting buildup of dead carcasses due to lack of maggots?
Heck, I don't know if female mosquitos perform any useful function besides being bat food & bird food -- maybe they don't. But I *like* bats & birds.
I just learned (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito) that there's even a species of mosquito that feeds on *other mosquitos' larvae*, and doesn't suck blood. What happens to the harmful mosquito population when we wipe those out, 'cause our stupid little robots don't know the difference?
My problem is with statements like "...consequenses would certainly be local....". How do we know that? What's Dr. Malcom's line in Jurassic Park? Something like "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." Or maybe "The lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here, uh... staggers me."
One argument is that mosquitoes have no ecological benefit...most if not all birds' diets can consist of other insect larvae and other adult insects.
All right. This is a religious issue, and I'm stupid to reply to it (and it's off topic, and I'm gonna kill my karma) but I'm going to do so anyway.
How on earth does anyone (and I'm not blaming the statement on you, Linuxathome) think they know enough to make a statement like this? I don't know much of anything about mosquitos' ecological niches (please note the plural, folks) but I can easily come up with several problems with the statements above.
Say some bird (or bat, or whatever else -- many other things eat mosquitos besides birds) stops eating mosquitos, and starts eating more of some other insect. Said insect's decline now causes some other consumer to eat something else (say, for argument's sake, bees). Now flowers aren't being pollinated, honey isn't being produced, cats and dogs start living together...you get the idea. We're talking biblical proportions here, folks.
I'm all for reducing disease (btw, there are lots of diseases borne by things other than misquitos) but let's not get too arrogant about our ability to describe how the world "works" in little soundbite descriptions.
No, according to the info on the web page (What?!? You didn't *read* the referenced material?!?!?) venting is in the sides, out the back.
Being Lotus Notes ignorant, I have to ask -- does Notes use some feature of IE under the covers? I ask, because my wife is a teacher & her school also uses Notes. I know she starts Notes as a separate app, and the default browser they configure on the school computers is Netscape, not IE.
:-)
She also uses Firefox or Netscape at home to read her email; I don't know if she can delete or not, though. And I'm not going to wake her up just to ask.
You forgot the ridiculous "action" sequences like surviving a fall from an airplane in a life raft, and the roller coaster mine railroad. Granted, a lot of the action in 1 & 3 were unrealistic, but at least they *felt* plausible.
"Temple of Doom" was beyond terrible. They only thing it had going for it was "Club Obi Wan"
...it [the name 'James Bond'] is a secret identity that is granted to one special agent every generation....
I like this. When do you supposed they changed his name from "Roberts" to "James" (and dropped the "Dread Pirate" title)?
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium:
"...the concentration of helium in the Earth's atmosphere is only 1 part in 200,000, largely because most helium in the Earth's atmosphere escapes into space due to its inertness and low mass."
who in their right mind would choose a career where you would be constantly required to peer at and finger poke the arseholes of strangers?
And strangers' is worse than friends' and family's in what way?
Well, it's just been conclusively demonstrated that a lot more people in the US admire Bush than not.
:-)
BZZZT. Thanks for playing, but next time bring your thinking cap with you.
Maybe: "...more people who voted in the US...."
Or: "...admire Bush than the other alternatives presented in the election."
How you get from "voted for" to "admire" is beyond me, too. But that's a different topic. Also, I won't even think about getting into the tinfoil hat possibility of "...more voting machine programmers admire...."
I voted this morning in a punch card state (Missouri) and I had *no* problem verifying my votes. Each choice has a unique number (printed on both the ballot & the punch card) and it was trivial to pull my card out of the machine, flip back through the ballot pages, and verify that the chad was gone from the right #s.
After I did that, *I* put the card in the (locked) collections box. I have a reasonable confidence that A) my card will be read correctly by the tabulating machine; and B) it will still be available should a recount be necessary.
Now, explain to me how a touchscreen provides anything "far easier" (and more accurate) than that?
I've bought the theatrical release of all 3, have bought the EE for the first two, and will have the RotK EE long before the end of the year. I wanted to be able to see both the released movies in the future and the additional scenes & features on the EEs.
For the record, I've been reading Tolkien since Jr. High (early 70s), have 4 kids, a granddaughter, and a grandson on the way.
Oh, yeah. My wife, who's never read any Tolkein and is clearly not *any* kind of geek, has been to all 3 movies with me. On opening day....
Well, I wasn't talking about most PCs. I was responding to your ...These features will probably NEVER be included on any x86 type box.... statement. My experience isn't mostly with desktop PCs; it's with servers. I'm sure we have some piece of x86 HW in our data centers somewhere without SCSI, but it'd be tough finding it in the thousands of systems with hot-swap SCSI disks.
I guess my point is that there are differences between x86 servers and PCs. And apparently, you don't know anything about real x86 servers. Would I rather have a HW/OS combination designed together for *really, really* important apps? Sure, because it'd be worth paying for. But that doesn't change the fact that 2 out of the 3 features you said would probably never exist on x86 already do.
What a stupid debate. alone rates a better mod; add in the 2nd paragraph and there should be no debate -- this ain't flamebait.
Uh, x86 SCSI controllers have been able to hot-swap hard drives for years. Has nothing to do with being x86 architecture, either.
To argue further, both HP (DL760) and IBM (x445) have hot-swap memory. Some Unisys & Dell models probably do, too; I'm just to lazy to check right now. I also keep hearing my vendors tell me they're working on hot-swap CPUs. I'll believe it when I see it but I don't suspect they're totally lying to me; I think they do think it's possible. Probably already works part/most of the time in the lab.
I don't know about 99% uptime & Sun HW, though; Sun is using more & more "off-the-shelf" components itself these days. I know we continue to have HW problems on *all* of our equipment, and we have a lot of Sun. The bigger advantage for Sun/Solaris (or HP/HP-UX, or IBM/AIX) is that the HW & SW are designed together, to interact. We don't have that yet with Linux, although it's going to be interesting to watch IBM with Linux on POWER over the next couple of years.
I do agree with you that "different tools, different jobs" is the right philosophy. We need to get out of the "if it's right for me, it must be right for you" mode that seems to be soooo prevalent these days.
I heard a story several years ago on NPR about a special group in France that gets called whenever someone (typically farmers) find unexploded ordnance. They get called several times a year, and find stuff from both World Wars as well as, occasionally, the Franco-Prussian War. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War
Wouldn't that information be better contained in a good PIM on a laptop system?
...I can't easily remove the hard drive and recover the data with another system.
Yes, if you can A) carry the laptop in your shirt pocket; and B) get the information within 5 seconds (and that *includes* getting the device out of your pocket.
I wouldn't trust any important data to a PDA. Too fragile...
That's what syncing to your computer is for. Also, backing up to the removable memory in your PDA. I have a complete backup on my laptop (files copied to another workstation) and I have another on a memory stick.
What's your point? If the hard drive in your computer dies, "easy" recovery isn't possible there, either. In the case either of a PDA or a computer, you have to think about what might go wrong and take appropriate measures; backups should be part of your strategy if the information is important.
As for "fragile", don't get me started. Thanks to certain brain-dead policies at work, I've gone through 7 different laptops in the last year. In seven years, I've used three PDAs, and only one actually died.
Sorry, been there, done that. Was trying to do something "artsy" for my high school photography class back in the late 70's....
And no, don't ask for the pic. A) I ain't that good-looking, and B) Heaven only knows where the negative & print is.