Agreed, un-kill Wash and Shepard Book. Although, honestly, a 7 year run could take place in the intervening year between the end of the series and movie.
Yeah, I gotta disagree with this one. I don't want a series where nobody can die (and wanting to undo their dramatically significant deaths suggests this desire). Especially in the "movie is still canon, and this happens before it, so you know exactly who is still alive and when," sense. That would be the worst.
Not sure a sane genius class River would improve a continued show any.
Yeah I have to agree with you there.
I'm going to be honest here. While it is truly a shame that the series was cut short, I think it's best left alone outside of some supplementary filler like the comics and whatnot. I don't think you could just hop right back in and recapture the magic. Hell, I even have a sneaking suspicious that in some ways the short run of the series was a godsend, since the end result is that pretty much every episode is a home run. But that's only a suspicion... If I had a time machine and a Fox-exec-calibrated-clue-stick, I'd go back and ensure that it wasn't taken off the air.
But barring that? Let's just let Firefly stand on its own.
She was publicly known to be a failure, and even the mangnitude of the failure was known. The nature of the failure was the only unknown.
And nobody cared to find out, because to do so you had to go through Reaver territory.
NThe people who ply the lanes of space would neither "overlook" nor "forget" an entire main planet over the course of less than 20 years. or could such a thing be hidden as, outer-most or not, it would show up on everybody's orbital computations as a huge perturbation in their plots. Let alone one ten-year-old with binoculars.
Well yeah, that's how they knew how to get there. River's psychic memory didn't even tell her what Miranda was, much less give coordinates. Once they figured out what it was, they knew right how to find it from records. But nobody but the Serenity crew was crazy enough to want to go there because it was in Reaver territory, nor did they have a reason to.
The original one from the series (mental erosion from facing the emptiness of space etc) was good enough. Hell, the movie contradicted the series directly. If the Pax caused reaverdom, the the episode where the one guy got tortured and became a reaver himself woudln't have worked
"Mental erosion" is okay, but doesn't explain how such a large population of Reavers came to be and gathered together, rather than just being random isolated cases of craziness. Pax shows how an initial population was formed. However neither explanation precludes others suffering from mental breakdowns once exposed to the insanity of the Reavers. Why would you assume that "Pax causes reaverdom" to mean "only Pax can cause reaverdom"?
That guy wasn't tortured btw... he only saw what they did to others (and lived because they didn't know he was there). Which makes perfect sense, even if the end result was him merely being a violent crazy, not technically a "Reaver". You need an explanation for why Reavers came to be. It doesn't take much explaining at all to see why someone else could be driven mad by exposure to Reaver's inhumanity.
Now, from what we've been seeing, a huge portion of the planetary systems consist of one or more "hot Jupiters". Massive gas giants orbiting extremely close to their parent star.
You mean a huge portion of planets we've found, and the reason for that is because they are by far the easiest exoplanets to find -- massive planets close to their sun create the most obvious wobble in the star and the shortest period over which to see it. These are the first exoplanets we were able to find, and we've been looking for them the longest, so it's no surprise we've found more of them than anything else. Given that they exist, that is. Before finding them, it was thought that gas giants couldn't exist that close to their star.
But then once we got more powerful instruments and refined our techniques, we gained the capability to find gas giants farther from their star, or rocky planets within a few multiples of earth mass very close to the star. And now we're finding those as fast as we are able. Fewer than "hot jupiters" because we haven't been looking for as long, and they take longer to find. But the very fact that as soon as we are able to detect a certain class of planet, we do, should be a hint.
We're only just barely reaching the edge of being able to detect earth-mass planets in the habital zone. So you can't determine from this data that such planets are rare.
On the contrary. Before we started finding exoplanets, we weren't sure if planetary systems were common at all. Now it's starting to look like they are essentially ubiquitous. And so far there's nothing to indicate that our particular type of system is rare, only that there exist more kinds of systems than we previously thought. But your estimate of number of sol-like systems in the galaxy or possible earth-like planets should only have gone up based on our findings.
As far as the rest of components of the equation for calculating the number of habitable worlds, I'm not going to say much. Yes our moon is fortunate, but the question is what range of stability in rotation is necessary, and how common such moons are. We definitely can't see those yet. Water is essential for life as we know it, but is hardly rare even in our own solar system. Mars is fairly stable, so if it were large enough to have held on to its atmosphere, it may still have the large quantity of surface water that we now know it used to have, and we'd have two candidates for life in our own solar system.
It could still be that the conditions necessary for life, much less life itself, is incredibly rare. However, stars like ours are not rare, and the jury is still out on the rarity of earth-like planets but the probability has only gone up since we started hunting for exoplanets. Again, this article itself is about evidence that the creation of our planet was not a freakishly improbable act in defiance of typical planet formation.
Destiny doesn't really factor into it. What we're learning is that essentially our planet is rare. Rocky planet of about the right size, at about the right distance, where our planet didn't fall into the sun, nor did a gas giant falling inwards destroy us, and with a very large moon serving to stabilize the planet's wobble.
Are we learning that?
I thought things were heading in the opposite direction. Considering that we've been finding exoplanets basically as fast as our capability allows, and every time we enhance our ability to find smaller planets farther from their star, we almost immediately find such a planet. We've found quite a few planets that are earth-like in mass already, closer to their parent star, not to mention tons of other things we didn't even think possible (like gas giants orbiting in earth-like orbits). So the evidence seems to be pointing at a ubiquity of planets, and a wider variety than we imagined.
Even this story is covering an improved model that seems to make earth-like planets in earth-like orbits more likely, not less. At least, if we figure that accretion disks of non-uniform temperature is more likely than uniform.
So I think the jury is still out on earth being a "perfect" scenario of extremely unlikely happenstance. But it wasn't that long ago that it was possible that planetary systems of any kind were a rarity, so at least the current trend is clear.
You can destroy anything if you apply the right force.
Of course. Even the forces binding the proton together are not so strong that one can't be blasted apart in a particle accelerator. Even the mythical and ludicrously strong material the Ringworld was made from had to succumb to this rule. It is in some ways trivial to take "unbreakable" in a way that it equals "non-existant".
I think it's more useful to define "unbreakable" to mean "within reason", and go from there. For a phone, being able to use it as an impromptu hammer is pretty good. Or being dropped off your balcony. Or submerged in water. That covers most of the abuse that a phone takes, so "unbreakable" as in "you aren't going to accidentally break it in normal circumstances" is pretty good. Though if a journalist can break it while standing at your booth at a trade show, then it seems it doesn't live up to even this lesser standard.
Of course the gold standard for unbreakability in mobile electronics is over twenty years old. Ah, now that is some damn sturdy hardware!
On the other hand, dip that thing in some water and see what happens...
You have to grow the egg artificially before it will hatch into a chicken...
Nice, I like that.
I've long said the answer to the chicken-and-egg question is the (chicken) egg, since any chicken had to come from a chicken egg, and however you genetically define "chicken" the "first" one wasn't layed by a chicken (by definition). But I never thought of it like that for applying the metaphor.
google doesn't have any experience fielding public customer service - all their products are free to the public with some commercial products that i guess would generate some limited helpdesk demands.
I'm sure their commercial helpdesk is extensive. But the nature of commercial support is a little different, and you're absolutely right their lack of experience bit them. I know several people who have worked on commercial tech support lines, like my mom*, and apparently you still get the same famous idiocy you've heard about in every other kind of help desk. It's not like "commercial" necessarily means "big company with their stuff together" in the first place (think of everyone who advertises through them).
I think the difference though is that in business-client support it's more incident-based, because you're fulfilling specific support contract terms that they payed for. In that context, "have someone in your employ (even if that means you) e-mail our help desk" is pretty reasonable, and if it's a technical problem you're a lot more likely to be able to talk to a technical person on the other side. On a consumer line it's all about maximizing the ratio of customer happiness to time wasted on them.
It's kinda funny, googling for "google nexus help" does show they have an online help center but it seems rudimentary (and asks you to email them for most problems). Most of the time, googling for help on something is a good way to find out how to fix it. But not when googling for Google, because Google isn't used to creating the content that googling for something provides.
* Before anyone asks, I know your mom too, obviously in a different context though a desk was involved.
You don't turn wood into bone... Cus it's not wood unless it's also bone. What you do is turn a limp noodle into bone and/or wood, which isn't the same.
Good job living under a rock. ARP replay attacks have been able to break into just about any WEP network with any traffic for quite a while now. All you need is a single ARP packet and you win.
Well I guess that's what he gets for watching 8 episodes of Cowboy Bebop instead of googling "WEP vulnerability exploits".
Well actually the main reason I disable SSID is to prevent curious neighbors from even seeing it.. they might be inclined to ask me 'hey I see you have Wireless.. can I use it?'.
Hey, that's actually a good reason to use a hidden ssid. If you consider your neighbor's nosiness and wheedling pressure to be a kind of social engineering, then you could even call it a security mechanism!
In my case, there are no less than 4 unsecured APs with default SSID names within range of my desktop alone, so I'm not worried about people asking if they can jump on mine.:)
I'd do it in a second, but I'm betting they put up a screen or something below your head so you can't watch, much less put a monitor/camera above my head so I can easily see what they're doing. Which kinda defeats the purpose, from my end at least.:)
I've been given the option to be awake for several procedures, and I always say yes, but then they always change their minds at the last minute and knock me out. Maybe they're put off by how eager I sound. Kinda like when the phlebotomist is about to draw blood and sees me staring at vein on my arm, and she says "Do you want to look away?" and I go "nope!", their look changes from one of sympathy to one of being a little weirded out.
Just use WPA-PSK. If they can break that and discover the shared key, the SSID and MAC filter "security" is incredibly trivial to break. In fact, since breaking the WPA would probably involve recording an authentication session between a client and the AP, breaking the encryption would mean they've found the SSID and MAC address for literally zero extra effort.
You want to talk about false senses of security, MAC filters and hidden SSIDs are right up there. I would agree that WEP is worse from that standpoint, because it actually claims to be a form of security when it's pretty terrible at that task. Hopefully people realize MAC filters and SSID hiding are like your chain link fence with an unlocked gate latch -- it keeps people out unless they, you know, try to get in. Layering it on top of WPA is pretty pointless.
Our modern civilization though protects the well being of even those with negative traits who would have otherwise naturally died out. That's not to say evolution in humans has stopped. Instead, we're simply not weeding out the negative traits.
Or rather, what constitutes a negative traits has changed based on our new environment.
I dunno, are you trying to? I mean, are you implying that because you can see the Galilean moons in a city that the OP didn't see them on a ship in the ocean? Maybe he doesn't have binoculars at home, or never cared to point them at the sky until away from the city when the majesty of the heavens is truly apparent.
In any event, it's true that you can see the moons in the city, which is good for people who might want to take a peek tonight but don't feel like getting to someplace dark. Though sadly light pollution combined with a slight haze can make them invisible when neither on their own would. It's definitely worth a shot for anyone with any kind of optics.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, un-kill Wash and Shepard Book. Although, honestly, a 7 year run could take place in the intervening year between the end of the series and movie.
Yeah, I gotta disagree with this one. I don't want a series where nobody can die (and wanting to undo their dramatically significant deaths suggests this desire). Especially in the "movie is still canon, and this happens before it, so you know exactly who is still alive and when," sense. That would be the worst.
Not sure a sane genius class River would improve a continued show any.
Yeah I have to agree with you there.
I'm going to be honest here. While it is truly a shame that the series was cut short, I think it's best left alone outside of some supplementary filler like the comics and whatnot. I don't think you could just hop right back in and recapture the magic. Hell, I even have a sneaking suspicious that in some ways the short run of the series was a godsend, since the end result is that pretty much every episode is a home run. But that's only a suspicion... If I had a time machine and a Fox-exec-calibrated-clue-stick, I'd go back and ensure that it wasn't taken off the air.
But barring that? Let's just let Firefly stand on its own.
She was publicly known to be a failure, and even the mangnitude of the failure was known. The nature of the failure was the only unknown.
And nobody cared to find out, because to do so you had to go through Reaver territory.
NThe people who ply the lanes of space would neither "overlook" nor "forget" an entire main planet over the course of less than 20 years. or could such a thing be hidden as, outer-most or not, it would show up on everybody's orbital computations as a huge perturbation in their plots. Let alone one ten-year-old with binoculars.
Well yeah, that's how they knew how to get there. River's psychic memory didn't even tell her what Miranda was, much less give coordinates. Once they figured out what it was, they knew right how to find it from records. But nobody but the Serenity crew was crazy enough to want to go there because it was in Reaver territory, nor did they have a reason to.
The original one from the series (mental erosion from facing the emptiness of space etc) was good enough. Hell, the movie contradicted the series directly. If the Pax caused reaverdom, the the episode where the one guy got tortured and became a reaver himself woudln't have worked
"Mental erosion" is okay, but doesn't explain how such a large population of Reavers came to be and gathered together, rather than just being random isolated cases of craziness. Pax shows how an initial population was formed. However neither explanation precludes others suffering from mental breakdowns once exposed to the insanity of the Reavers. Why would you assume that "Pax causes reaverdom" to mean "only Pax can cause reaverdom"?
That guy wasn't tortured btw... he only saw what they did to others (and lived because they didn't know he was there). Which makes perfect sense, even if the end result was him merely being a violent crazy, not technically a "Reaver". You need an explanation for why Reavers came to be. It doesn't take much explaining at all to see why someone else could be driven mad by exposure to Reaver's inhumanity.
Now, from what we've been seeing, a huge portion of the planetary systems consist of one or more "hot Jupiters". Massive gas giants orbiting extremely close to their parent star.
You mean a huge portion of planets we've found, and the reason for that is because they are by far the easiest exoplanets to find -- massive planets close to their sun create the most obvious wobble in the star and the shortest period over which to see it. These are the first exoplanets we were able to find, and we've been looking for them the longest, so it's no surprise we've found more of them than anything else. Given that they exist, that is. Before finding them, it was thought that gas giants couldn't exist that close to their star.
But then once we got more powerful instruments and refined our techniques, we gained the capability to find gas giants farther from their star, or rocky planets within a few multiples of earth mass very close to the star. And now we're finding those as fast as we are able. Fewer than "hot jupiters" because we haven't been looking for as long, and they take longer to find. But the very fact that as soon as we are able to detect a certain class of planet, we do, should be a hint.
We're only just barely reaching the edge of being able to detect earth-mass planets in the habital zone. So you can't determine from this data that such planets are rare.
On the contrary. Before we started finding exoplanets, we weren't sure if planetary systems were common at all. Now it's starting to look like they are essentially ubiquitous. And so far there's nothing to indicate that our particular type of system is rare, only that there exist more kinds of systems than we previously thought. But your estimate of number of sol-like systems in the galaxy or possible earth-like planets should only have gone up based on our findings.
As far as the rest of components of the equation for calculating the number of habitable worlds, I'm not going to say much. Yes our moon is fortunate, but the question is what range of stability in rotation is necessary, and how common such moons are. We definitely can't see those yet. Water is essential for life as we know it, but is hardly rare even in our own solar system. Mars is fairly stable, so if it were large enough to have held on to its atmosphere, it may still have the large quantity of surface water that we now know it used to have, and we'd have two candidates for life in our own solar system.
It could still be that the conditions necessary for life, much less life itself, is incredibly rare. However, stars like ours are not rare, and the jury is still out on the rarity of earth-like planets but the probability has only gone up since we started hunting for exoplanets. Again, this article itself is about evidence that the creation of our planet was not a freakishly improbable act in defiance of typical planet formation.
Destiny doesn't really factor into it. What we're learning is that essentially our planet is rare. Rocky planet of about the right size, at about the right distance, where our planet didn't fall into the sun, nor did a gas giant falling inwards destroy us, and with a very large moon serving to stabilize the planet's wobble.
Are we learning that?
I thought things were heading in the opposite direction. Considering that we've been finding exoplanets basically as fast as our capability allows, and every time we enhance our ability to find smaller planets farther from their star, we almost immediately find such a planet. We've found quite a few planets that are earth-like in mass already, closer to their parent star, not to mention tons of other things we didn't even think possible (like gas giants orbiting in earth-like orbits). So the evidence seems to be pointing at a ubiquity of planets, and a wider variety than we imagined.
Even this story is covering an improved model that seems to make earth-like planets in earth-like orbits more likely, not less. At least, if we figure that accretion disks of non-uniform temperature is more likely than uniform.
So I think the jury is still out on earth being a "perfect" scenario of extremely unlikely happenstance. But it wasn't that long ago that it was possible that planetary systems of any kind were a rarity, so at least the current trend is clear.
You can destroy anything if you apply the right force.
Of course. Even the forces binding the proton together are not so strong that one can't be blasted apart in a particle accelerator. Even the mythical and ludicrously strong material the Ringworld was made from had to succumb to this rule. It is in some ways trivial to take "unbreakable" in a way that it equals "non-existant".
I think it's more useful to define "unbreakable" to mean "within reason", and go from there. For a phone, being able to use it as an impromptu hammer is pretty good. Or being dropped off your balcony. Or submerged in water. That covers most of the abuse that a phone takes, so "unbreakable" as in "you aren't going to accidentally break it in normal circumstances" is pretty good. Though if a journalist can break it while standing at your booth at a trade show, then it seems it doesn't live up to even this lesser standard.
Of course the gold standard for unbreakability in mobile electronics is over twenty years old. Ah, now that is some damn sturdy hardware!
On the other hand, dip that thing in some water and see what happens...
You have to grow the egg artificially before it will hatch into a chicken...
Nice, I like that.
I've long said the answer to the chicken-and-egg question is the (chicken) egg, since any chicken had to come from a chicken egg, and however you genetically define "chicken" the "first" one wasn't layed by a chicken (by definition). But I never thought of it like that for applying the metaphor.
google doesn't have any experience fielding public customer service - all their products are free to the public with some commercial products that i guess would generate some limited helpdesk demands.
I'm sure their commercial helpdesk is extensive. But the nature of commercial support is a little different, and you're absolutely right their lack of experience bit them. I know several people who have worked on commercial tech support lines, like my mom*, and apparently you still get the same famous idiocy you've heard about in every other kind of help desk. It's not like "commercial" necessarily means "big company with their stuff together" in the first place (think of everyone who advertises through them).
I think the difference though is that in business-client support it's more incident-based, because you're fulfilling specific support contract terms that they payed for. In that context, "have someone in your employ (even if that means you) e-mail our help desk" is pretty reasonable, and if it's a technical problem you're a lot more likely to be able to talk to a technical person on the other side. On a consumer line it's all about maximizing the ratio of customer happiness to time wasted on them.
It's kinda funny, googling for "google nexus help" does show they have an online help center but it seems rudimentary (and asks you to email them for most problems). Most of the time, googling for help on something is a good way to find out how to fix it. But not when googling for Google, because Google isn't used to creating the content that googling for something provides.
* Before anyone asks, I know your mom too, obviously in a different context though a desk was involved.
You don't turn wood into bone... Cus it's not wood unless it's also bone. What you do is turn a limp noodle into bone and/or wood, which isn't the same.
Are you sure they actually put you under?
Well that's what the anesthetist told me they were doing in each of these cases, so I'm guessing yeah.
I'd be all for it as long as all amateur surgeries were required to be filmed and posted on youtube.
Good job living under a rock. ARP replay attacks have been able to break into just about any WEP network with any traffic for quite a while now. All you need is a single ARP packet and you win.
Well I guess that's what he gets for watching 8 episodes of Cowboy Bebop instead of googling "WEP vulnerability exploits".
Well actually the main reason I disable SSID is to prevent curious neighbors from even seeing it.. they might be inclined to ask me 'hey I see you have Wireless.. can I use it?'.
Hey, that's actually a good reason to use a hidden ssid. If you consider your neighbor's nosiness and wheedling pressure to be a kind of social engineering, then you could even call it a security mechanism!
In my case, there are no less than 4 unsecured APs with default SSID names within range of my desktop alone, so I'm not worried about people asking if they can jump on mine. :)
My friend had a Cardiac Cath examination and got to watch the whole thing on the same monitors that the cardiologists were working from.
Oh hell yeah. That's what I'm talking about.
I'd do it in a second, but I'm betting they put up a screen or something below your head so you can't watch, much less put a monitor/camera above my head so I can easily see what they're doing. Which kinda defeats the purpose, from my end at least. :)
I've been given the option to be awake for several procedures, and I always say yes, but then they always change their minds at the last minute and knock me out. Maybe they're put off by how eager I sound. Kinda like when the phlebotomist is about to draw blood and sees me staring at vein on my arm, and she says "Do you want to look away?" and I go "nope!", their look changes from one of sympathy to one of being a little weirded out.
Yes, but that means aliens.
So it'd be an Alien Resurrection? Oh god, I will make sure to run for the hills then! That movie was awful!
Grandparent:
It would be like this large barrier that burns up any unauthorized data that tries to get by.
Parent:
You mean like that, you know, wall-thing they put in cars between the passengers and the engine compartment in a car.
Ah, and the difference between people who's visualization of a "fire wall" comes from real life, versus Advanced Dungeons and Dragons becomes clear. ;)
Just use WPA-PSK. If they can break that and discover the shared key, the SSID and MAC filter "security" is incredibly trivial to break. In fact, since breaking the WPA would probably involve recording an authentication session between a client and the AP, breaking the encryption would mean they've found the SSID and MAC address for literally zero extra effort.
You want to talk about false senses of security, MAC filters and hidden SSIDs are right up there. I would agree that WEP is worse from that standpoint, because it actually claims to be a form of security when it's pretty terrible at that task. Hopefully people realize MAC filters and SSID hiding are like your chain link fence with an unlocked gate latch -- it keeps people out unless they, you know, try to get in. Layering it on top of WPA is pretty pointless.
I guess that means that if I hear theremin music I should head for the hills...
Our modern civilization though protects the well being of even those with negative traits who would have otherwise naturally died out. That's not to say evolution in humans has stopped. Instead, we're simply not weeding out the negative traits.
Or rather, what constitutes a negative traits has changed based on our new environment.
Offtopic, my keister! It's practically dripping with topicity!
Then you might not want to apply so much topical cream to it!
BTW, you won the internet today. I'm going to be humming that song tonight as I look at Ol' Jupes.
Would a spherical torus would look something like a 4-sided triangle?
Triangle Man, Triangle Man.
Triangle Man hates Spherical Torus Man.
They have a fight.
Plasma Man wins.
Triangle Man.
Nuclear reactor training?
Haha, that joke will have them all laughing at the Pwinceton Pwecious Wittle Pwasma Physics Wabowatowy, right before their milk and nappy time.
There is no doubt that the Church in that period was an oppressive force.
On the other hand there is the question of whether the Church oppressed science because science itself offended them, and the answer is largely no.
Heretics were the hippies of the 1600s.
Or am I ruining a good story?
I dunno, are you trying to? I mean, are you implying that because you can see the Galilean moons in a city that the OP didn't see them on a ship in the ocean? Maybe he doesn't have binoculars at home, or never cared to point them at the sky until away from the city when the majesty of the heavens is truly apparent.
In any event, it's true that you can see the moons in the city, which is good for people who might want to take a peek tonight but don't feel like getting to someplace dark. Though sadly light pollution combined with a slight haze can make them invisible when neither on their own would. It's definitely worth a shot for anyone with any kind of optics.