The Doctor:
Ah. Yes. Blimey. Sorry. Christmas Eve on a rooftop, saw a chimney, my whole brain went, "What the hell?" Don't worry, fat fellow will be doing the rounds later. I'm just scoping out the general chimneyness. Nice size, good traction.
[burns his hand on the mantle]
Bit thick.
Eric:
Fat fella?
The Doctor:
Father Christmas. Santa Claus. Or, as I've always known him, "Jeff."
Boy:
There's no such person as Father Christmas!
The Doctor:
Oh yeah?
[whips out a photo]
Me and Father Christmas, Frank Sinatra's hunting lodge, 1952. See him in the back with the blonde. Albert Einstein, the three of us together. Vroom! Watch out! Okay? Keep the faith. Stay off the naughty list. Oo! Now what's this, then? I love this. Big flashy lighty thing. That's what brought me here. Big flashy lighty things have got me written all over them. Not actually. Give me time and a crayon. Now! This big flashy lighty thing is connected to the spire on your dome, yeah? And it controls the sky. Well, technically it controls the clouds. Which technically aren't clouds at all. Well they're clouds of tiny particles of ice. Ice clouds. Love that. Who's she?
Sardick:
Nobody important.
The Doctor:
"Nobody important"? Blimey, that's amazing. D'you know, in 900 years of time and space I've never met anyone who wasn't important before? Now, this console is the key to saving that ship, or I'll eat my hat. If I had a hat. I'll eat someone's hat. Not someone who's using their hat; I don't want to shock a nun, or something. Sorry, rambling, cos... cos this isn't working!
Sardick:
The controls are isomorphic - one to one - they respond only to me.
The Doctor:
Oh, you fibber. Isomorphic! There's no such thing.
[Sardick demonstrates. The Doctor attempts to repeat the demonstration.]
The Doctor:
These controls are isomorphic!
Sardick:
The skies of this entire world are mine. My family tamed them, and now I own them.
The Doctor:
Tamed the sky? What does that mean?
Sardick:
It means I'm Kazran Sardick. How can you possibly not know who I am?
The Doctor:
Well, just easily bored, I suppose. So, I need your help, then.
Sardick:
Make an appointment.
Thing is, all this distraction and mental gymnastics ends up gathering everything he needs to know in order to do what he's come to do. People who lack and disdain such an ability are Sardicks.
The Doctor:
I think you'll find I'm universally recognised as a mature and responsible adult.
[shows him the psychic paper]
Young Kazran:
It's just a lot of wavy lines.
The Doctor:
Yeah, shorted out. Finally, a lie too big.
If it comes to that, you might as well make it BlueTooth so your keyboard and mouse are wireless and pair it to a mobile phone for network connectivity.
It should also say that it can note determining its (and by inference your) velocity as well to within legally acceptable accuracy. Then they can call it the Heisenburg Certainty Warning. You could get issued an HC Citation automatically, compounded for the duration of the violation.
Pusling: How do you tell if you've used enough deodorant? The Drifter: You grab an Orc and shove its head into your armpit. If it passes out, it's time for another coat.
And what of all the people who dump their bit buckets irresponsibly? All those loose bits floating down the gutters and sewers find their way into our rivers and streams, inducing transcription errors in fish and other wildlife!
If you get it with 3G but don't activate 3G, does the GPS still work?
I have unlimited 3G on my cell, but tethering is metered unless I jailbreak. It also limits the size of apps I can download over 3G, requiring WiFi usage for anything over 20 MB.
There are many reasons for the lack of Blu-ray adoption.
Not wanting to repurchase what you already have on DVD.
A lot of content is simply good enough at DVD quality. Even the 1953 War of the Worlds movie was shot in 4:3 and monaural sound. A lot of old movies just won't be converted unless given a good remastering and clean-up a la Star Wars.
Larger selection of DVDs already available.
DVDs have been on the market for decades and back catalogs of content deemed sellable has been picked mostly clean.
Old television content unlikely to be converted to HD.
With only a handful of exceptions (Star Trek, The Prisoner), most television content just isn't HD quality, especially that which was shot on video or for which the original film stock was disposed. It'll be decades before we have an equivalent quantity of HD television available on Blu-ray, and not even everything produced today gets a release now.
No reason to repackage old content.
While Blu-rays can still contain SD content, even the anamorphic forms found on DVD, they won't a whole multi-season SD series in SD on Blu-ray media to save you shelf space because the market expects (and the format may contractually require?) that there be HD content on those disks
Format-war backlash and discounted HD DVDs.
People did sour over having to choose between two formats, including those that got burned on preferring HD DVD, and then there are those who now see HD DVDs as a way to get a lot of content at extremely cheap prices. Some $25 Blu-ray movies can be found for $3.14 or less in HD DVD, and even some of those HD DVDs are hybrids that also play as DVDs. Free shipping, too!
Trade-ins for Blu-ray editions being needlessly stingy and for limited times only.
Red2Blu (HD DVD to Blu-ray) and DVD2Blu (DVD to Blu-ray) offers have restrictive terms limiting the number of disks you can upgrade per household and time periods where if you're too slow getting the sleeves in the mail you're not getting anything back, and meanwhile your cases are missing their sleeves or you're settling for inferior photocopies (if they didn't require actually damaging your original packaging).
I could probably come up with more, but I don't have all night to do so, and/. only allows you so much time to compose a message without requiring you to refresh to a new form. (At least I didn't lose my first draft.)
Now we can see you. Stand out in the middle of the room. Stand back to back. Clasp your hands behind your heads. Do not touch one another. The house is surrounded. You may as well say good-bye.
And by the way, while we are on the subject, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head"!
But also useful for giving surreptitious orders to the computer, but giving it a unique name to use as a trigger-word allows for that too:
Avon:
The greatest single factor is our armament, together with our main computer, Zen. As targets bear, main blasters will fire. Nine zero, full thrust!
Zen:
[s/, Zen. As/. Zen: as/] Confirmed.
I remember reading an interview with a Prison Break executive who said "So and so died in the 2nd season but we found a way to plausibly bring her back."
Yeah, her severed head was in a box. Instead, they retconned her to have escaped and that it was another person's head that looked like hers in the box. Her "death" was written in because the actress was noticeably pregnant. The actress wasn't even in the character's "final" episodes.
"The guy was killed in an auto accident! I looked it up! He was driving in the Yukon, in a pink convertible, to visit his brother who's an ex-con named Frances, when a tractor trailer comes along and decapitates him. You know what that means? It means he doesn't have a head. How am I supposed to write for a guy who doesn't have a head?! He's got no lips, no vocal cords. What do you want me to do?" -- Rose Schwartz, Soapdish
That's nothing compared to the ongoing so-called Tommy Westphall Universe, with series still ongoing that can be traced back to having a connection with St. Elsewhere, including all the US-based Law & Orders (except the reality series Crime & Punishment), with one of many implications that they are all elements of character Tommy Westphall's imagination.
Not that those collecting the connections don't have flaws in their criteria for a connection. IMO, a background set decoration making a reference to a company from another series is not a valid criteria: corporations aren't crossover characters. Morley? Yoyodyne? Sorry, not good enough.
In the end, there’s a simple conclusion for everyone who wants a low cost system: keep your old Pentium 4 system if you have to, but bear in mind that all relevant metrics (performance, noise, power, and efficiency) are pathetic by modern standards.
If you can afford to spend a few hundred dollars on a nettop, we’d definitely recommend this. We usually rant about Atom due to its shortcomings compared to desktop platforms, but it simply trounces the old P4s. Keeping a PC in service for seven or eight years is more than enough. Just make sure you go for a dual-core Atom when you decide to buy.
Running Ubuntu, but on a Pentium 4 HT with only 2 GB RAM. 3 GHz, but still just a Pentium 4. Last upgrade I got was the second GB of RAM so it could run Ubuntu.
An object at rest will remain at rest and an object in motion will remain in motion in a straight line and at a constant speed, unless acted upon by an outside force. F=m*a, but also a=F/m. Applying a force to a mass produces acceleration; acceleration cannot exist without a force being applied. Any force will do: pushing, pulling, magnetic attraction/repulsion or gravity. If there are no forces upon the mass, there is no acceleration. If there is acceleration, there is a force acting upon the mass. Remove the force and the acceleration disappears and you're left with a constant velocity imparted to the mass.
Do you not know that acceleration and velocity are different things? Acceleration is a = dv/dt: a change of velocity over time?
As long as you're undergoing acceleration, you're not in an inertial frame of reference because your velocity vector is changing. So no, someone undergoing acceleration cannot have a valid perception that they are stationary and the rest of the universe is accelerating instead. Otherwise Earth being completely stationary and the whole Universe spinning around it in a complex ballet would be a valid interpretation of reality. It is empirically false.
For one, because it takes far more force to move an entire universe around one individual than it does to move one individual around in a universe at any speed, let alone relativistic speeds. Such an exertion of force upon the whole universe will be hard to ignore, and the energy requirements to do so could not be solely attributable to the propulsion device your moving twin is using.
Slashdot Mirror
Thing is, all this distraction and mental gymnastics ends up gathering everything he needs to know in order to do what he's come to do. People who lack and disdain such an ability are Sardicks.
The Doctor: I think you'll find I'm universally recognised as a mature and responsible adult. [shows him the psychic paper] Young Kazran: It's just a lot of wavy lines. The Doctor: Yeah, shorted out. Finally, a lie too big.Video Wall.
The Atari 2600 did analog audio and video over a single RCA connector decades ago.
If it comes to that, you might as well make it BlueTooth so your keyboard and mouse are wireless and pair it to a mobile phone for network connectivity.
It should also say that it can note determining its (and by inference your) velocity as well to within legally acceptable accuracy. Then they can call it the Heisenburg Certainty Warning. You could get issued an HC Citation automatically, compounded for the duration of the violation.
Or generate random hashes and see what they get?
I've seen sites that answered their own question of, "Why pay $9.95? Our price: $8,478,902,736.92".
Of course, whenever it is in the customer's favor, it's always a pricing error.
Pusling: How do you tell if you've used enough deodorant?
The Drifter: You grab an Orc and shove its head into your armpit. If it passes out, it's time for another coat.
And what of all the people who dump their bit buckets irresponsibly? All those loose bits floating down the gutters and sewers find their way into our rivers and streams, inducing transcription errors in fish and other wildlife!
If you get it with 3G but don't activate 3G, does the GPS still work?
I have unlimited 3G on my cell, but tethering is metered unless I jailbreak. It also limits the size of apps I can download over 3G, requiring WiFi usage for anything over 20 MB.
There are many reasons for the lack of Blu-ray adoption.
I could probably come up with more, but I don't have all night to do so, and /. only allows you so much time to compose a message without requiring you to refresh to a new form. (At least I didn't lose my first draft.)
They can train their AI on the amazing Regret Index.
AI: "I wish I had never heard of herring sandwiches!"
It runs on deuterium ore!
Now we can see you. Stand out in the middle of the room. Stand back to back. Clasp your hands behind your heads. Do not touch one another. The house is surrounded. You may as well say good-bye.
And by the way, while we are on the subject, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head"!
But also useful for giving surreptitious orders to the computer, but giving it a unique name to use as a trigger-word allows for that too:
Avon: The greatest single factor is our armament, together with our main computer, Zen. As targets bear, main blasters will fire. Nine zero, full thrust! Zen: [s/, Zen. As/. Zen: as/] Confirmed.And the nanny-cam industry, detecting when teenagers left home alone are getting frisky on the couch.
Well, if wrestling, cooking, and Braveheart count...
Who's the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows?
"I know you are, but what am I?" -- Chewbacca (translated)
I remember reading an interview with a Prison Break executive who said "So and so died in the 2nd season but we found a way to plausibly bring her back."
Yeah, her severed head was in a box. Instead, they retconned her to have escaped and that it was another person's head that looked like hers in the box. Her "death" was written in because the actress was noticeably pregnant. The actress wasn't even in the character's "final" episodes.
"The guy was killed in an auto accident! I looked it up! He was driving in the Yukon, in a pink convertible, to visit his brother who's an ex-con named Frances, when a tractor trailer comes along and decapitates him. You know what that means? It means he doesn't have a head. How am I supposed to write for a guy who doesn't have a head?! He's got no lips, no vocal cords. What do you want me to do?" -- Rose Schwartz, Soapdish
That's nothing compared to the ongoing so-called Tommy Westphall Universe, with series still ongoing that can be traced back to having a connection with St. Elsewhere, including all the US-based Law & Orders (except the reality series Crime & Punishment), with one of many implications that they are all elements of character Tommy Westphall's imagination.
Not that those collecting the connections don't have flaws in their criteria for a connection. IMO, a background set decoration making a reference to a company from another series is not a valid criteria: corporations aren't crossover characters. Morley? Yoyodyne? Sorry, not good enough.
Intel Pentium 4 Vs. Atom: A Battle Of The Generations, Conclusion
Running Ubuntu, but on a Pentium 4 HT with only 2 GB RAM. 3 GHz, but still just a Pentium 4. Last upgrade I got was the second GB of RAM so it could run Ubuntu.
No root access.
An object at rest will remain at rest and an object in motion will remain in motion in a straight line and at a constant speed, unless acted upon by an outside force. F=m*a, but also a=F/m. Applying a force to a mass produces acceleration; acceleration cannot exist without a force being applied. Any force will do: pushing, pulling, magnetic attraction/repulsion or gravity. If there are no forces upon the mass, there is no acceleration. If there is acceleration, there is a force acting upon the mass. Remove the force and the acceleration disappears and you're left with a constant velocity imparted to the mass.
Do you not know that acceleration and velocity are different things? Acceleration is a = dv/dt: a change of velocity over time?
As long as you're undergoing acceleration, you're not in an inertial frame of reference because your velocity vector is changing. So no, someone undergoing acceleration cannot have a valid perception that they are stationary and the rest of the universe is accelerating instead. Otherwise Earth being completely stationary and the whole Universe spinning around it in a complex ballet would be a valid interpretation of reality. It is empirically false.
For one, because it takes far more force to move an entire universe around one individual than it does to move one individual around in a universe at any speed, let alone relativistic speeds. Such an exertion of force upon the whole universe will be hard to ignore, and the energy requirements to do so could not be solely attributable to the propulsion device your moving twin is using.
Keep the speaker, attach the button to a much larger box, and make it play random sound samples instead of typing.
"Yes!" "No!" "Hell no!" "Ask again later." "Sell!" "We're all gonna die!" "Bees!"