"When it was launched in the UK, SCO said that by purchasing the licence, customers are "properly compensating SCO for the Unix source code, derivative Unix code and other Unix-related intellectual property and copyrights owned by SCO as it is currently found in Linux"."
Of course, I really wonder if this is actually on the license agreement, because they certainly haven't mentioned Linux taint in court for a looooong time, and statements like this have a habit of being challenged in the UK. Think Sontag has spent a lot of time over here?
"There is only so much conflict a movie can have in it before it just makes you numb and quite frankly, bored."
There's also only so much knowledge you can hammer into a yank's head regarding the distopian society produced by the industrialisation impinging on the English Countryside and the death of 'Merrie England', which is essentially what the scouring of the shire is about. Your comment is entirely indicative that any Hollywood historical adaptations should come with a mandatory quantity of salt, or possibly Ritalin.
"If you're packing the battery with more and more volatile chemicals that may explode to get that power, it's quite right."
Okay, well I'm going to take a seat, and you're going to explain the circumstances where the volatile chemicals are being packed into space to create BATTERY BOMBS.
No, seriously, take your time. This should be good.
"even when subjected to the great unwaashed masses who do things like take the phone into the shower, leave it in a puddle, and drive over it."
Ah, so now you're blaming the end user with a fairly nasty strawman argument, after pointing out that there is a direct link between the threat of litigation and the damage caused. As the majority of people _may_ not reach the dizzying heights of intellectual prowess that you have obviously attained, then I suspect that you don't consider these to be random events, but instead the products of abuse. Is that what you're thinking?
"Puncture wound. Now what does that have to do with failure rates?"
Lordy, another one. Right, Slashdot uses a system of threading for 'comments', which allows for the nesting of multiple answers to an original post, which gives people plenty of opportunity to produce unoriginal and bland 'funnies' in response to a 'straight' line. So when you (and I'm laughing internally. Still!) said "Now what does that have to do with failure rates?", you may not have read the entirety of the discussion before feverishly jabbing the 'submit' button.
The premise is that an extremely small failure rate is acceptable. My argument is that an extremely small failure rate that causes bodily injury is slightly different to a comparison of the failure rate for something like DVD blanks, which rarely, if ever, spontaneously injure people.
The latter attracts lawsuits like nomarks to a straightline on slashdot.
Was that good enough, or should I use smaller words and fire up Visio?
Still, now you've won the war on drugs, and nearly all the terrorists are in Guantanomo bay, the war against home-tapers should be over by Christmas.
I have a much better idea, though. Slap a chainlink fence around the coastline and assume that everyone is a criminal until they can prove otherwise. A bank statement should suffice, because the rich have no reason to commit crime.
"Techically, he's commander-in-chief of the US military."
No, he is the commander-in-chief. There's no 'technically' about it. Your other points were about his military training rather than rank.
"His title is honorary, like a PhD granted to a prominent celibrity."
Garbage. Go check up the chain of command in a decent textbook. There is an inbalance of power for veto purposes that was brought about during the Reagan years, but the military is under the direct command of the oval office.
"Referring to the target as an "unarmed non-combatant" is probably more appropriate."
So, not 'President'?
"It it okay to market a game which reenacts the Reagan assasination,"
I suspect that anything is pretty much fair game for the entertainment industry, but it's not about what's 'okay', because that is as subjective a judgement as whether it's tasteful. Who is going to make that judgement, and wouldn't it be better to allow the market to judge the merits of the game in question?
Should you really even consider getting into this question lest we point out how many native americans got slaughtered for the cowboy films, or whether Jerry Bruckheimer should be apologising to Somalis. Political correctness is simply bollocking around trying not to offend people, and this is largely about political correctness.
"If you're okay with that game"
I'm halfway through San Andreas. I have this fairly hard disconnect between a game and real life. Fewer orphans in games.
"To me, this is way within acceptable margin of error or uncontrollability."
Until your mom's hair catches fire.
"It is a shame, and I am sure it is painful for the people and i do feel bad, but lets not get out of hand with this."
Dunno where you're from, but such items come with warranties about being free from defects, and electrical items that catch fire could be considered defective. Are you this lacksadaisical about anything you buy?
"As the handbook suggests just such a configuration - I'm sure you'll agree it shouldn't be a big problem to set up."
I followed the handbook to the letter and I got no joy. Then tried someone else's Howto. No joy.
Essentially the ppp.log would be filled with 'unknown protocol', for which I couldn't find a decent explanation, so I chickened out and went for the path of least resistance in buying the router. Possibly not within the spirit of BSD, but I'd much rather fix stuff in my code than diagnose what was happening with PPP in something that should be trivial.
"In order to achieve a comparable level of security but avoiding dedicated ADSL modems"
The Alcatel is the lowest of the low. Apart from the fact that you're loading the firmware up every time you power the thing on, you're sitting off the USB bus. To each their own, though.
"but I'm loathed to spash out on new kit"
40 spondoolicks gets a very good little modem with firewall, VPN, routing. Another 20 spons and you get 54Mbps. Like I said, I chickened out.
"I really want my LAN insulated from the ADSL link by a gateway machine."
You could dual-home, certainly your plan appears to use the one machine as a bastion host, AP and router...
And the majority is being tracked by NORAD down to the size of around a basketball; which is the major reason why they actually justify the Cheyenne mountain budget. No. No points for Stargate jokes. Note that this addresses your point about tracking being limited; the military stares outwards.
Civilian tracking is generally a matter of watchin g for new stuff.
"we still don't know where the radioactive material on the spacecraft landed."
It's the largely technical problem of finding an object the size of a basketball in an oval area 150 miles wide in the minor axis by 7000 miles in the long axis, the majority of that being water. 270 grams isn't much, and it's probably fairly safe for the moment.
"Maybe not so much with something this big, but you could always claim that it's an expended booster or maybe a failed research satellite if you didn't want anyone paying attention to it."
This was what they said about some Bigbird satellites, except someone did point out that failed satellites don't change orbit. I think that the veil of secrecy surrounding KH lasted for all of five years.
"I'm currently stuck trying to get my Alcatel/Thompson "Speedtouch 330" (Revision 4) ADSL modem to work under FreeBSD 5.3."
I struggled with that for a couple of months before biting the bullet and buying a wireless router. Probably not the most elegant solution, but it did the job.
"Atheros chipset in my Dlink DWL G520 PCI wireless net card"
And you're trying to connect up an Alcatel? You're either operating on the mother of all shoestrings or you have far too much time.
Kennedy was 'commander in chief', and came with a full set of Secret Service bodyguards. The elasticity of the term 'unarmed civilian' is approaching breaking point there.
On the other hand, who the hell is celebrating the aniversary of the assassination? Except Discovery channel.
"So was 9/11, and I think most people would be quite offended if someone were to make a 'hit the twin towers flight simulator'-type game out of it."
Already been done with MS Flight Simulator; more sickening was the wholesale removal of the twin towers from any picture that originally contained them, or the removal of said things from games. Offense is very much a personal thing, and like pleasing people, you can't catch everyone all the time. Live with it.
"My point was that even counting their long hibernation cycles they should have had 1,000 years of awake-time to improve their technology."
Given the desire to do so, and given that they actually invented it in the first place. They appear to be a degenerating society with ultimate longevity that might not have the same imperatives. What I was suggesting was that their empire fell due to a lack of resistence; when you're top of the food chain you don't have to strive too hard.
Given that they may not have a social imperative to 'become better', then it does seem conceivable that their technology would have moved forward that much. Ancient technology certainly didn't move that far forward in the time it took to traverse to Pegasus.
"Perhaps I should have been more precise."
Nah, I would've been a pedantic sh** if you had.
"made 10,000 years ago by people defeated by (presumably) the wraiths."
Defeated is such a definate word. Driven to a stalemate? Bear in mind that we still don't know why they abandoned the city in the first place.
"On the other hand, the difference in complexity of travelling through a force field and a lump of titanium is something I have no direct experience with, so I'm willing to concede this point."
Titanium is a collection of empty space sparsely populated with nuclei and electrons, whereas a forcefield seems to have no problem stopping anything. It's like a sci-fi law or something.
Regarding the Tolan advance vs the Ancient advance; there does appear to be parallel development along certain lines. But I don't think that any of the races encountered really had the same blend of technology. Consider aboriginal hunters from Australia, South America and Africa and their different approaches, environments and basic technology of wood and stone.
"since any race with technology that rivals the Ancients must also have the ability to synthesise food indistinguishable from the real thing on a molecular level at a negligible cost."
True enough, but bear in mind that there may be objections about doing that. They do seem particularly arrogant, but we haven't yet established that their technology was on a par with the ancients. All we know is that the Ancients 'lost', which could come from superior tactics or the ability to take a beating and still keep coming.
"Relegating them to the rôle of subject-race"
I can see that coming, but I don't think it would be the end of series one; for one thing that would echo the mistake they made with SG-1. They just destroyed a fricking unkillable nasty and may have just made the first entrances to systemlordhood. That's impressive.
"The Atlantis crew would then be caught in the crossfire between two ascended races at war"
I like your idea with a couple of caveats; the ascended stuff was more of a plot device to keep Jackson's job alive and appears to be a more personal affair than sublimation (Iain M Banks, esentially sublimed races just get out of the business of mucking about with spacetime.) I never liked the idea of ascension.
The other one is that I don't know how the jiminy you'd express a space opera with the 'squad-based' stuff that the series revolves around. If you've never read any Iain M Banks, you should take a look. Right up your cul de sac.
"Remaining more amorphous, perhaps with a caricature human shape for communication, would have reduced the amount of anthropomorphism."
Yeah, I can't understand the consistent pinocchio desire for artificial organisms to become human.
"All their weapons were designed to work against the Ancients, who were presumably well past the need to use physical weapons."
I'm being forced into the sci-fi geek corner. Bugger.
Okay, but bear in mind that the Ancient weapon used by the puddlejumper is a 'drone'. Essentially a guided missile, which I have some problems with, but it's a physical weapon. So far the only energy weapon we've seen is the mother of all laser pointers in Antartica and the Wraith stunner; certainly there is the inference that there are two distinct technological strands at work. Without speculating too far ahead (we never found out about the city in episode 1), the wraith appear to be _massively_ nomadic, which matches a pattern of early human hunter/gatherers rather than the later agrarian and communal humans.
In fact, they look like they're degenerating rapidly due to a decadance in having destroyed resistance and 'farming' the human worlds for the last few millenia; decadent societies don't have the same drive towards achievement as other societies.
"The replicators are still damaged by the guns of the humans"
Got to love kinetic energy, although you'll notice that the replicator++ (human form) isn't phased by bullets, and that the relicators are roughly aligned with the technology that they absorb, which made the ones on the Russian sub _extremely_ pants.
"all the tech that the Asgard have."
The consistent thread throughout the entire series is that the Asgard are dying off because of extensive reliance on technology, and the Goa'uld have stolen all of theirs. Similar to the way that flint napping is practised by few people on a hobby basis today, it's conceivable that the disconnect between old and new might be one of the root causes of their problems. (despite the deus ex machina produced by O'neill in episode 1).
" I think the main problem with TORCHES on a spaceship is that in space you are somewhat limited in oxygen."
As someone pointed out, it's even conceivable that the torches are along the lines of oxygen candles; but we don't get the complaints about the technology, or the ease of which Samantha Carter has figured out which crystal to place in which spot to achieve certain results...we get complaints about the fricking decor. May as well point out that drapes aren't much use in a spaceship.
"Well, unless they have some nifty device that can create oxygen out of thin air."
The horrible pun aside, they seem to manage quite well producing 1G 'down'. And Oxygen/Nitrogen mix at STP with a slight lemony fragrance wouldn't be rocket science.
That might be nullified by said underpaid, overworked and badly motivated person going postal, but I suspect that can be put down to Marilyn Manson.
More seriously, the airport and passport system is supposed to be the most high security set of information around, y'know, to stop people hijacking them with boxcutters, but it turns out that Sen. Kennedy can be stopped from flying because he's using an known alias of a terrorist. Kennedy. Senator Kennedy. Who engaged their brain in dealing with that faux pas? Likewise if you have a tracking system that someone considers infallible, how the hell are you, as an individual who lies, going to argue against a computer that never lies?
The 'problem' per se is this slavish idea that technology will solve everything. It can't, especially when there is reliance on it.
"Established in 1967 by some British guy with a boat, it provides the ideal setting for those not interested in complying with IP laws. This is because they don't have any. None, natha, zero. They don't honor anyone else's either. Which is handy. If I am not mistaken"
While it's a lovely idea, Sealand wouldn't take a whole lot to repatriate and would be forced to undertake the laws relevant to the nearest landmass; they're already erecting barriers in terms of not allowing infringing content because they can still be sued.
"the real hurdle is getting a hold of cables of unbelievable strength made of a substance that doesn't yet exist."
The substance and the cables exist, just not in 60 mile lengths, or anything real length that can be spun to produce 60 mile lengths, but I think the important thing is that people are taking this seriously.
"and the massive destruction the entire thing causes when it comes down, after they break off the counterweight asteroid it's using."
To be fair, the 'Red Mars' space elevator is a great deal more massive and technically capable compared with the nascent plans for a ribbon and crawler that we're currently looking at.
Slashdot Mirror
"For the record, the problem is not merely the Chinese government; the problem is also the Chinese people."
Racist flamebait gets modded 'insightful'. I can only hope this is ignorance from people who've never travelled outside of their borders.
"Google generally acquiesces to the policies of Beijing"
Google acquieces to the policies of governments. It's because they make crap revolutionaries.
"It's not worthless to SCO."
Truer words, mon frere...
"When it was launched in the UK, SCO said that by purchasing the licence, customers are "properly compensating SCO for the Unix source code, derivative Unix code and other Unix-related intellectual property and copyrights owned by SCO as it is currently found in Linux"."
Of course, I really wonder if this is actually on the license agreement, because they certainly haven't mentioned Linux taint in court for a looooong time, and statements like this have a habit of being challenged in the UK. Think Sontag has spent a lot of time over here?
"There is only so much conflict a movie can have in it before it just makes you numb and quite frankly, bored."
There's also only so much knowledge you can hammer into a yank's head regarding the distopian society produced by the industrialisation impinging on the English Countryside and the death of 'Merrie England', which is essentially what the scouring of the shire is about. Your comment is entirely indicative that any Hollywood historical adaptations should come with a mandatory quantity of salt, or possibly Ritalin.
"If you're packing the battery with more and more volatile chemicals that may explode to get that power, it's quite right."
Okay, well I'm going to take a seat, and you're going to explain the circumstances where the volatile chemicals are being packed into space to create BATTERY BOMBS.
No, seriously, take your time. This should be good.
"even when subjected to the great unwaashed masses who do things like take the phone into the shower, leave it in a puddle, and drive over it."
;)"
Ah, so now you're blaming the end user with a fairly nasty strawman argument, after pointing out that there is a direct link between the threat of litigation and the damage caused. As the majority of people _may_ not reach the dizzying heights of intellectual prowess that you have obviously attained, then I suspect that you don't consider these to be random events, but instead the products of abuse. Is that what you're thinking?
"Oh, yes please. I could use the nap
The milk and cookies will have that effect.
"OpenBSD is an example of how auditing is necessary but not sufficient."
Not sufficient for what? Your implication is that OpenBSD is vulnerable, but this appears to be a throwaway comment.
"The architects of Windows NT"
IBM, or do you mean further down the road than that?
"Puncture wound. Now what does that have to do with failure rates?"
Lordy, another one. Right, Slashdot uses a system of threading for 'comments', which allows for the nesting of multiple answers to an original post, which gives people plenty of opportunity to produce unoriginal and bland 'funnies' in response to a 'straight' line. So when you (and I'm laughing internally. Still!) said "Now what does that have to do with failure rates?", you may not have read the entirety of the discussion before feverishly jabbing the 'submit' button.
The premise is that an extremely small failure rate is acceptable. My argument is that an extremely small failure rate that causes bodily injury is slightly different to a comparison of the failure rate for something like DVD blanks, which rarely, if ever, spontaneously injure people.
The latter attracts lawsuits like nomarks to a straightline on slashdot.
Was that good enough, or should I use smaller words and fire up Visio?
The War On Terror. Unfortunate acronym.
Still, now you've won the war on drugs, and nearly all the terrorists are in Guantanomo bay, the war against home-tapers should be over by Christmas.
I have a much better idea, though. Slap a chainlink fence around the coastline and assume that everyone is a criminal until they can prove otherwise. A bank statement should suffice, because the rich have no reason to commit crime.
"Techically, he's commander-in-chief of the US military."
No, he is the commander-in-chief. There's no 'technically' about it. Your other points were about his military training rather than rank.
"His title is honorary, like a PhD granted to a prominent celibrity."
Garbage. Go check up the chain of command in a decent textbook. There is an inbalance of power for veto purposes that was brought about during the Reagan years, but the military is under the direct command of the oval office.
"Referring to the target as an "unarmed non-combatant" is probably more appropriate."
So, not 'President'?
"It it okay to market a game which reenacts the Reagan assasination,"
I suspect that anything is pretty much fair game for the entertainment industry, but it's not about what's 'okay', because that is as subjective a judgement as whether it's tasteful. Who is going to make that judgement, and wouldn't it be better to allow the market to judge the merits of the game in question?
Should you really even consider getting into this question lest we point out how many native americans got slaughtered for the cowboy films, or whether Jerry Bruckheimer should be apologising to Somalis. Political correctness is simply bollocking around trying not to offend people, and this is largely about political correctness.
"If you're okay with that game"
I'm halfway through San Andreas. I have this fairly hard disconnect between a game and real life. Fewer orphans in games.
"4.88 10E-7 is a lower failure rate than I have had with bad DVDs."
And what injury could you sustain from a bad DVD?
"If you're cramming more and more power in a small space, what you're making is a small bomb," said Carl Hilliard..."
Well, that's a fundamental misunderstanding of bombs and batteries.
"To me, this is way within acceptable margin of error or uncontrollability."
Until your mom's hair catches fire.
"It is a shame, and I am sure it is painful for the people and i do feel bad, but lets not get out of hand with this."
Dunno where you're from, but such items come with warranties about being free from defects, and electrical items that catch fire could be considered defective. Are you this lacksadaisical about anything you buy?
"As the handbook suggests just such a configuration - I'm sure you'll agree it shouldn't be a big problem to set up."
I followed the handbook to the letter and I got no joy. Then tried someone else's Howto. No joy.
Essentially the ppp.log would be filled with 'unknown protocol', for which I couldn't find a decent explanation, so I chickened out and went for the path of least resistance in buying the router. Possibly not within the spirit of BSD, but I'd much rather fix stuff in my code than diagnose what was happening with PPP in something that should be trivial.
"In order to achieve a comparable level of security but avoiding dedicated ADSL modems"
The Alcatel is the lowest of the low. Apart from the fact that you're loading the firmware up every time you power the thing on, you're sitting off the USB bus. To each their own, though.
"but I'm loathed to spash out on new kit"
40 spondoolicks gets a very good little modem with firewall, VPN, routing. Another 20 spons and you get 54Mbps. Like I said, I chickened out.
"I really want my LAN insulated from the ADSL link by a gateway machine."
You could dual-home, certainly your plan appears to use the one machine as a bastion host, AP and router...
"There's lots of junk up there."
And the majority is being tracked by NORAD down to the size of around a basketball; which is the major reason why they actually justify the Cheyenne mountain budget. No. No points for Stargate jokes. Note that this addresses your point about tracking being limited; the military stares outwards.
Civilian tracking is generally a matter of watchin g for new stuff. "we still don't know where the radioactive material on the spacecraft landed."
It's the largely technical problem of finding an object the size of a basketball in an oval area 150 miles wide in the minor axis by 7000 miles in the long axis, the majority of that being water. 270 grams isn't much, and it's probably fairly safe for the moment.
"Maybe not so much with something this big, but you could always claim that it's an expended booster or maybe a failed research satellite if you didn't want anyone paying attention to it."
This was what they said about some Bigbird satellites, except someone did point out that failed satellites don't change orbit. I think that the veil of secrecy surrounding KH lasted for all of five years.
"I'm currently stuck trying to get my Alcatel/Thompson "Speedtouch 330" (Revision 4) ADSL modem to work under FreeBSD 5.3."
I struggled with that for a couple of months before biting the bullet and buying a wireless router. Probably not the most elegant solution, but it did the job.
"Atheros chipset in my Dlink DWL G520 PCI wireless net card"
And you're trying to connect up an Alcatel? You're either operating on the mother of all shoestrings or you have far too much time.
"an unarmed civilian is another."
Kennedy was 'commander in chief', and came with a full set of Secret Service bodyguards. The elasticity of the term 'unarmed civilian' is approaching breaking point there.
On the other hand, who the hell is celebrating the aniversary of the assassination? Except Discovery channel.
"So was 9/11, and I think most people would be quite offended if someone were to make a 'hit the twin towers flight simulator'-type game out of it."
Already been done with MS Flight Simulator; more sickening was the wholesale removal of the twin towers from any picture that originally contained them, or the removal of said things from games. Offense is very much a personal thing, and like pleasing people, you can't catch everyone all the time. Live with it.
"Can I come round your house?"
You're going to need a lot of come, it's fairly large.
"My point was that even counting their long hibernation cycles they should have had 1,000 years of awake-time to improve their technology."
Given the desire to do so, and given that they actually invented it in the first place. They appear to be a degenerating society with ultimate longevity that might not have the same imperatives. What I was suggesting was that their empire fell due to a lack of resistence; when you're top of the food chain you don't have to strive too hard.
Given that they may not have a social imperative to 'become better', then it does seem conceivable that their technology would have moved forward that much. Ancient technology certainly didn't move that far forward in the time it took to traverse to Pegasus.
"Perhaps I should have been more precise."
Nah, I would've been a pedantic sh** if you had.
"made 10,000 years ago by people defeated by (presumably) the wraiths."
Defeated is such a definate word. Driven to a stalemate? Bear in mind that we still don't know why they abandoned the city in the first place.
"On the other hand, the difference in complexity of travelling through a force field and a lump of titanium is something I have no direct experience with, so I'm willing to concede this point."
Titanium is a collection of empty space sparsely populated with nuclei and electrons, whereas a forcefield seems to have no problem stopping anything. It's like a sci-fi law or something.
Regarding the Tolan advance vs the Ancient advance; there does appear to be parallel development along certain lines. But I don't think that any of the races encountered really had the same blend of technology. Consider aboriginal hunters from Australia, South America and Africa and their different approaches, environments and basic technology of wood and stone.
"since any race with technology that rivals the Ancients must also have the ability to synthesise food indistinguishable from the real thing on a molecular level at a negligible cost."
True enough, but bear in mind that there may be objections about doing that. They do seem particularly arrogant, but we haven't yet established that their technology was on a par with the ancients. All we know is that the Ancients 'lost', which could come from superior tactics or the ability to take a beating and still keep coming.
"Relegating them to the rôle of subject-race"
I can see that coming, but I don't think it would be the end of series one; for one thing that would echo the mistake they made with SG-1. They just destroyed a fricking unkillable nasty and may have just made the first entrances to systemlordhood. That's impressive.
"The Atlantis crew would then be caught in the crossfire between two ascended races at war"
I like your idea with a couple of caveats; the ascended stuff was more of a plot device to keep Jackson's job alive and appears to be a more personal affair than sublimation (Iain M Banks, esentially sublimed races just get out of the business of mucking about with spacetime.) I never liked the idea of ascension.
The other one is that I don't know how the jiminy you'd express a space opera with the 'squad-based' stuff that the series revolves around. If you've never read any Iain M Banks, you should take a look. Right up your cul de sac.
"Remaining more amorphous, perhaps with a caricature human shape for communication, would have reduced the amount of anthropomorphism."
Yeah, I can't understand the consistent pinocchio desire for artificial organisms to become human.
"All their weapons were designed to work against the Ancients, who were presumably well past the need to use physical weapons."
I'm being forced into the sci-fi geek corner. Bugger.
Okay, but bear in mind that the Ancient weapon used by the puddlejumper is a 'drone'. Essentially a guided missile, which I have some problems with, but it's a physical weapon. So far the only energy weapon we've seen is the mother of all laser pointers in Antartica and the Wraith stunner; certainly there is the inference that there are two distinct technological strands at work. Without speculating too far ahead (we never found out about the city in episode 1), the wraith appear to be _massively_ nomadic, which matches a pattern of early human hunter/gatherers rather than the later agrarian and communal humans.
In fact, they look like they're degenerating rapidly due to a decadance in having destroyed resistance and 'farming' the human worlds for the last few millenia; decadent societies don't have the same drive towards achievement as other societies.
"The replicators are still damaged by the guns of the humans"
Got to love kinetic energy, although you'll notice that the replicator++ (human form) isn't phased by bullets, and that the relicators are roughly aligned with the technology that they absorb, which made the ones on the Russian sub _extremely_ pants.
"all the tech that the Asgard have."
The consistent thread throughout the entire series is that the Asgard are dying off because of extensive reliance on technology, and the Goa'uld have stolen all of theirs. Similar to the way that flint napping is practised by few people on a hobby basis today, it's conceivable that the disconnect between old and new might be one of the root causes of their problems. (despite the deus ex machina produced by O'neill in episode 1).
"they are rather heavy on theatrics at times."
An almost British level of understatement. It's meant as a compliment.
" I think the main problem with TORCHES on a spaceship is that in space you are somewhat limited in oxygen."
As someone pointed out, it's even conceivable that the torches are along the lines of oxygen candles; but we don't get the complaints about the technology, or the ease of which Samantha Carter has figured out which crystal to place in which spot to achieve certain results...we get complaints about the fricking decor. May as well point out that drapes aren't much use in a spaceship.
"Well, unless they have some nifty device that can create oxygen out of thin air."
The horrible pun aside, they seem to manage quite well producing 1G 'down'. And Oxygen/Nitrogen mix at STP with a slight lemony fragrance wouldn't be rocket science.
"Someone tell me the problem"
+1 on the unemployment line?
That might be nullified by said underpaid, overworked and badly motivated person going postal, but I suspect that can be put down to Marilyn Manson.
More seriously, the airport and passport system is supposed to be the most high security set of information around, y'know, to stop people hijacking them with boxcutters, but it turns out that Sen. Kennedy can be stopped from flying because he's using an known alias of a terrorist. Kennedy. Senator Kennedy. Who engaged their brain in dealing with that faux pas? Likewise if you have a tracking system that someone considers infallible, how the hell are you, as an individual who lies, going to argue against a computer that never lies?
The 'problem' per se is this slavish idea that technology will solve everything. It can't, especially when there is reliance on it.
"Established in 1967 by some British guy with a boat, it provides the ideal setting for those not interested in complying with IP laws. This is because they don't have any. None, natha, zero. They don't honor anyone else's either. Which is handy. If I am not mistaken"
While it's a lovely idea, Sealand wouldn't take a whole lot to repatriate and would be forced to undertake the laws relevant to the nearest landmass; they're already erecting barriers in terms of not allowing infringing content because they can still be sued.
"the real hurdle is getting a hold of cables of unbelievable strength made of a substance that doesn't yet exist."
The substance and the cables exist, just not in 60 mile lengths, or anything real length that can be spun to produce 60 mile lengths, but I think the important thing is that people are taking this seriously.
"and the massive destruction the entire thing causes when it comes down, after they break off the counterweight asteroid it's using."
To be fair, the 'Red Mars' space elevator is a great deal more massive and technically capable compared with the nascent plans for a ribbon and crawler that we're currently looking at.